It's Geopolitics, Stupid!

In the Stone Age, I took a course (undergraduate) in Political Geography. I learned about Friedrich Ratzel, Halford J. Mackinder, and so on, but I don't remember Isaiah Bowman. However, if you want to understand the bloodbaths of Africa and Europe, read on. I think that the author of this review — Christian Parenti — is the son of one of the most courageous academics of our time: Michael Parenti. I wish that I had a tiny bit of the Parenti courage to tell it like it is.

[x In These Times]

By Christian Parenti

The World Was Not Enough

The role of intellectuals and ideas in the project of empire has once again come to the fore. Witness the triumphs of William Kristol, Robert Kagan and others associated with the Project for the New American Century, who in many ways scripted the Iraq war long before it happened. The basic scaffolding of modern empire requires ideas, after all, just as much as it requires violence and treasure.

Thus it is worth consulting Neil Smith’s new book on Isaiah Bowman, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. This volume marks something of a turn for Smith, whose first book, Uneven Development, focused on Marxist geographic theory. His second book, the widely read and perfectly timed New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, applied such theory to gentrification in a series of international case studies. In American Empire we get something totally different: a richly detailed, very empirical political biography. (In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I know Smith fairly well.)

Not often addressed by historians, Isaiah Bowman was in fact an important player in the intellectual entourages of both Woodrow Wilson and FDR. He helped draw up the modern border of Europe, helped shape America’s non-committal policy toward Jewish refugees from Nazism, and ran Johns Hopkins University and the Council of Foreign Relations. In all these capacities, he sought to harness ideas to the larger project of American commercial and political power on a global scale. Smith’s detailed and well-crafted book is simultaneously the story of Bowman, the story of geography as a discipline, and the story of American imperial thinking from World War I to the onset of the Cold War.

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Fittingly, Bowman’s tale begins on the land. Born in 1878 and raised on a poor farm in Michigan, Bowman was acutely aware of the enduring frontier character of his natal terrain. By age 19, the bookish farm boy had taken a job as a country schoolteacher. This coincided with America’s “splendid little war” in Cuba and the Philippines. To do his part, Bowman formed a volunteer militia but was never called up. By dint of hard work and study, he soon made his way to Michigan State and from there to Harvard. This bastion of WASP erudition and social power transformed Bowman from a provincial into a real scholar and properly connected elite. At Harvard the young man studied geography, a discipline that was then a quasi-hard science, a stepchild of geology dominated, as Terry Eagleton recently put it, by “maps and chaps.” Bowman’s impact on geography—he later taught it at Yale—was to help steer the discipline toward a more social footing, but it would be many more decades before geography became the highly theoretical, political, and star-studded field we’ve seen in recent years.

As part of his geographical fieldwork, Bowman participated in several South American expeditions mapping and “discovering” places, in particular very high places in Peru. He was part of the famous Machu Picchu expedition of 1911 led by the self-aggrandizing Hiram Bingham, who later became governor of Connecticut and a U.S. senator. The “discovery” of the ancient Inca city was actually a rather simple publicity stunt by rich, white adventurers. Local people had never really “lost” the fabled city; indeed, some Quechua still lived on and around the ruins.

Like the gentlemen geographers he emulated, Bowman was steeped in racism. While on expedition in Peru he once commandeered pack animals, “hijacked” several Quechua porters at gunpoint, and even beat another who was reluctant to work. But this sort of thing, like empire more generally, was justified in Bowman’s worldview by the noble and anesthetizing pursuit of scientific knowledge. It was an intellectualizing escape clause that Bowman would use throughout his life.

In reality, Bowman’s life and thought was progressively less scientific and evermore pragmatically political. As a young man, his interests were by today’s definitions rather geological: He studied with William Morris Davis and was interested in the role of water in creating landscape; his explorations in Peru involved mapping rivers. Later, Bowman became interested in settlement patterns; his assumption was that “the character of the physical features” of the earth “has been a prominent factor in the life of a race.” Bowman believed more or less that space created race, and that the interaction of racial national groups with the physical landscape was the essence of politics. Connected to this notion—which leaned heavily on the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who first coined the term Lebensraum—was the idea that politics was about controlling people and territory.

Yet later in life, Bowman would articulate a form of American control that left direct territorial control aside for the sake of economic conquest. So it is fitting that Bowman’s early southern “conquests” took a symbolic form of cartography. He drew maps of territory, seizing it symbolically rather than actually, but helping to open it to external economic and indirect political control all the same. It was this flexible, informal style of governance that was increasingly defining America’s international power in the era when Bowman was at the height of his powers in government.

For Smith this is a key point. “American globalism”—by which he means American capitalist expansion coupled with U.S. military and diplomatic power projection—never duplicated the cumbersome European form of direct territorial control. Save for a few actual colonies like Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the United States has always preferred the low overhead and “plausible denial” offered by an informal, arm’s length empire of client states. The importance of Bowman in all this was that as official geographer No. 1, it was he who most clearly articulated a liberal academic justification for American Lebensraum as economic conquest. The easiest way forward for American elites was to stick to the heart of the matter: capital accumulation and the conquest of markets.

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As an expert on settlement patterns, Bowman got his first truly big break when Woodrow Wilson called upon him to join the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. There the American geographer helped lead a massive study, called The Economic and Social History of the World War, better known simply as the “Inquiry,” whose whole purpose was to formulate the basis of a “scientific peace.” Toward that end Bowman created “scientific” yet rather generous borders for Poland, which—along with being based on much closer study of economic, cultural, and topographical regions—created a healthy bulwark against the young Bolshevik state to the east. In Paris Bowman was also instrumental in building closer ties between the U.S. and U.K. delegations. After the war, these links deepened, and as head of the newly created Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) one of Bowman’s many projects was to cement postwar Anglo-American cooperation. In many ways this development augured the passing of the baton of global hegemony across the Atlantic from England to America.

Under Bowman’s lead, the CFR became a hothouse of American imperial imagination and a “contact bazaar.” By the 1970s the CFR was dismissed by conservatives as too liberal, but during Bowman’s tenure the CFR was a virtual private adjunct to the State Department. Every secretary of state who held office between 1921 and 1944 made speeches of “historic significance” before the CFR, and many of its members graduated from its private and highly secretive seminars into direct government service. It was around this time in 1935 that Bowman also became president of John Hopkins University, a post he would hold until 1948.

Smith describes this period of Bowman’s career as marked by forward thinking liberalism. By today’s bellicose Rumsfeldian standards, Bowman and the rest of his ilk were downright sissies: They believed in diplomacy, and for a while even had a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union. Bowman even expressed an amoral, technocratic concern about the disruptive impacts of U.S. foreign investment in Latin America. But in some ways, this phase in his thought strikes one as simple Realpolitik in the face of socialism and a faltering global economy. He was, in short, a careful international planner, but his guiding vision was still U.S. economic domination—not as colonial ruler but as “resource trustee,” guarding the wealth and development of the tropics.

Bowman’s moment of greatest political influence was also his absolute moral nadir. Like most WASPs, Bowman at first greeted Hitler as a “windbag” but one that might actually be useful in putting down the red tide of socialism. Bowman even rejoiced during the 1942 Nazi counter-offensive, when Operation Barbarossa looked like it would take down the Soviet Union by liquidating millions of Russians. But all this became truly deranged when Bowman was put in charge of “Project M,” in which the question of Jewish refugee resettlement was to be “scientifically” managed. Again Bowman was tapped because of his expertise on settlement patterns and “frontier belts.” But nothing useful or concrete ever came of Bowman’s reams of data and maps, much of which remained classified until 1960.

In the face of clear Nazi genocide, Bowman, like many other beltway elites, twiddled his thumbs while the Jews were slaughtered. In this regard Bowman hid behind the academic pettifogging of “Project M”: Refugee settlement required lots of planning, thin population distribution, lots of capital and suitable rural or frontier zones to absorb the deracinated populations. Instead of urging Roosevelt to absorb refugees from Nazi terror, Bowman suggested elaborate, expensive, developmentalist policies that sought to link refugee flows to the needs of capital by settling out-of-the-way areas like rural Venezuela or Argentina.

Behind Bowman’s studied lack of concern for the victims of Nazism was a deep-seated anti-Semitism. It seems he felt threatened by Jews, or at least by too many of them in one urban place where they might exert influence on the levers of capital and political power. As for the creation of a Jewish state, Bowman opposed the idea as it was developing in Palestine, not so much out of anti-Semitism but rather because he feared the Zionist project would require massive America subsidies and military support (which indeed it did, and does). Ultimately, Bowman’s work on “Project M” calls to question the whole political edifice of scholarly detachment and the moral compartmentalization it promulgates.

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For Smith, the guiding thread in Bowman’s work was that he “envisaged a global supervisory role for the United States.” At the end of World War II, this was best advanced through an American-dominated United Nations, which would create a diplomatic check on Soviet power and structure the inevitable decolonization movements on the horizon. But this effort turned out to be something of a failure, at least from an imperialist point of view, because the United Nations always had too much autonomy and too many states, and was not an effective enough tool of the United States. While this is true, Smith may go too far when he says the United Nations “frustrated” American global ambition. In the Cold War, America never ruled just as it pleased, but neither was it denied a role as the leading global power, from the Bretton Woods financial framework to nuclear proliferation to the crushing of Third World insurgencies in Guatemala and Iran.

At home Bowman embraced the Cold War with red-phobic zeal, denouncing Marxism in the universities and turning harshly on the Soviet Union, which he saw as the only real check on American power. Ultimately, Bowman was both a visionary who provided academic services and imperial imagination to American rulers and a craven egghead who wasted vast sums of government wealth on unread and unused geographical studies.

But what strikes one most is Bowman’s opportunism: He was to the right of Roosevelt but subtly changed positions so as to always be in favor. He spent his life in the cloistered comfort of Ivy League universities and the inner sanctums of the executive branch. He was a stone-cold racist and anti-Semite who let Jews burn and talked of brown people in the global south as “smaller peoples” in need of control and guidance. One of his last acts of accommodation just before his retirement and early death was to passively allow a Hopkins colleague and social acquaintance, Owen Lattimore, to be red-baited by McCarthy and driven out of a job. It was the perfect, politely brutal end to Bowman’s career, which is to say his life.

Christian Parenti is the author of The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America, to be published in September by Basic Books.

© 2003 In These Times

Ben Sargent Strikes Again

Amarillo's Ben Sargent is the equivalent of Richard Nixon's Herblock. Here is Ben's take on W's protection of the Saudi royal family:

W's Ambivalence Toward Saudi Arabia

Herblock captured Richard Nixon's five o'clock shadow and furrowed brow. What has Ben Sargent captured in W?

The WPA Federal Writers' Project & HIST 1302-004

Earlier this week, I was leading my cheerful survey class through the Great Depression/New Deal chapter in Nash, The American People, 5e. Somehow, the Federal Writers' Project came up. Today, in the NYTimes, Douglas Brinkley wrote a nice piece about the Writers' Project. Through the magic of the Internet, I posted the article to my WebCT Bulletin Board for my students. Sadly, few will bother to read it, but I am pleased that I can add to a classroom experience immediately. Waiting until next week would be inappropriate because — in a survey course during the summer — there really isn't time to back up. There is a major test on Monday and we move on to post-1945 U.S. history for the remaining week+ of the term. We're waist deep in the Big Muddy and the fool says, Push On!

August 2, 2003

Unmasking the Writers of the W.P.A.

By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

NEW ORLEANS, Writers are usually unabashed about claiming authorship for their work. So it's curious that many of the alumni of one of the most significant American literary projects of the 20th century were ashamed of it: the Federal Writers' Project, a program of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration.

Created in 1935, in the heart of the Great Depression, the Writers' Project supported more than 6,600 writers, editors and researchers during its four years of federal financing. When the government funds expired, Congress let the program continue under state sponsorship until 1943. Although grateful for even subsistence wages in a time of economic despair, few participants deemed it a badge of honor to earn $20 to $25 a week from the government.

But the Library of Congress takes a different view. With little fanfare, it has been unpacking boxes of extraordinary Writers' Project material over the last few years from warehouses and storage facilities. After an arduous vetting process, much of it is now available to the public.

What is becoming clear, says Prof. Jerrold Hirsch of Truman State University, in Kirksville, Mo., is that the editors of the project believed that they could build a national culture on diversity. "They faced a great challenge coming out of the 1920's, where white supremacists, via WASP primacy and the K.K.K. and anti-immigration laws, held sway," Mr. Hirsch said. "In the Federal Writers' Project, ethnic minorities were celebrated for being turpentine workers or grape pickers or folk artists."

John Cheever was one of the program's unenthusiastic participants. A child of proud Massachusetts Republicans who had called the W.P.A. short for "We Poke Along," he was ashamed of working as a "junior editor" at the program's Washington office. He once described his duties as fixing "the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards."
Nonetheless, Cheever's experiences at the Writers' Project provided the material for many of the best scenes in his 1957 novel, "The Wapshot Chronicle."

Cheever wasn't the only one who found inspiration at the Writers' Project. Others included Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Malcolm Cowley, Edward Dahlberg, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, Kenneth Rexroth, Harold Rosenberg, Studs Terkel, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright and Frank Yerby.

These federal employees produced what would become the renowned American Guide Series, comprising volumes for each of the 48 states that then existed, as well as Alaska. The Writers' Project also turned out many other regional, city and cultural guides, like Algren's "Galena, Illinois" and Wright's "Bibliography of Chicago Negroes." All in all, it published more than 275 books, 700 pamphlets and 340 "issuances" (articles, leaflets and radio scripts).

Eudora Welty even served as photographer for the Mississippi guide. W. H. Auden called the whole project "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state."

Cataloging the output has been a long project. John Cole, director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, has been working on it since 1978, when he first read Jerre Mangione's seminal study "The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943."

"The Library of Congress has its work cut out," Mr. Cole explained in a telephone interview from his office on Capitol Hill. "It's an amazing collection. The Federal Writers' Project helped us rediscover our heritage in a more detailed and colorful way than it had ever been described. I'm thinking here of both the state guides and all of those other publications that they put out ? the collection offers the best examples of local history and oddball anecdotal stories ever amassed."

Nearly 3,000 of the oral history interviews are now available on the Library of Congress's W.P.A. Life Histories Web site:

WPA Site

with more to come.

In the last few years, some good biographies of the most notable alumni have been published. But no one has yet tackled a broad-based study of the thousands of untested but talented young writers who fanned out across the continent in search of a collective self-portrait of America. Recently, though, a number of scholars and researchers have begun to track the literary paper trail, unearthing documents and writings that have been packed in boxes for decades.

Pam Bordelon, a writer in Pensacola, Fla., for example, has spent the last 10 years editing interviews and compiling artifacts from the project's Poets Recording Expeditions Into the Floridas. She has traveled all over the state, searching for Writers' Project work done by Hurston, who was hired to collect folklore during the 1930's.

"I was just blown away by the richness," Ms. Bordelon recalled. "The voices in Florida alone are unbelievable."

David A. Taylor, a writer, and Andrea Kalin, a Washington filmmaker, have begun work on "American Voices," a documentary focusing on the Writers' Project in four states: New York, Florida, Illinois and Nebraska. One discovery is unpublished correspondence between Cheever and Ellison, who met at the project.

"The F.W.P. was much more than guidebooks and oral histories," Ms. Kalin explained. "It was where social and economic history met the individual imagination in literature."

But it is difficult to trace authorship for the W.P.A. guides. Mr. Bellow, for example, left mention of his Writers' Project work at the Chicago office out of his entry in Who's Who in America. In "Bellow," his biography of the author, James Atlas writes that Mr. Bellow was humbled to be toiling alongside hard-drinking literary heroes of the proletariat, like Algren and Jack Conroy, editor of the leftist journal The Anvil. Mr. Bellow explains in the book, "I rather looked up to them, and they looked down on me."

Mr. Bellow, whose first Writers' Project job was inventorying Illinois periodicals at the Newberry Library, was later assigned to write 20-page profiles of writers like John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson and James T. Farrell. Mr. Atlas discovered the essays only a few years ago when he was researching "Bellow."

"They're incredible essays, very advanced for somebody 21 or 22 years old," Mr. Atlas said. Mr. Bellow, he said, was ecstatic to reread them recently, amazed that they still existed.

Wright and Walker were also first published while employed in the Chicago office. Studs Terkel, another veteran, used the oral history techniques he learned in the late 1930's as his model for books like "The Good War" (1984) and "Working" (1974). And Albert Murray, perhaps Ellison's closest friend as well as the author of classic works like "South to a Very Old Place" (1971), maintains that without the Writers' Project, Ellison would not have written Invisible Man.

"It was because of the Writers' Project that I first got to read pieces Ralph was writing on his own," Mr. Murray recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Harlem. "It pulled him away from music and focused him on writing. It put writers and artists in touch as they had never been before. It was even more intense than the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout `Invisible Man' there are sketches and caricatures of people he met during the Federal Writers' Project."

Ellison himself is quoted in a Library of Congress document as saying that the Writers' Project helped him better understand the powerful connection between serious literature and folkways. "I tried to use my ear for dialogue to give an impression of just how people sounded," he notes in the document. "I developed a technique of transcribing that captured the idiom rather than trying to convey the dialect through misspellings."

But Ellison, like many of his peers, didn't like to talk much about his days as a government employee. "He wanted to move away from it," Mr. Murray said. "It was his training ground. But he had higher concepts of art than the W.P.A. Guide Series."

Yet to many, the guide series are treasures. William Least Heat Moon said he wouldn't have written "PrairyErth: A Deep Map" (1991) without the Nebraska guide. When John Gunther hit the road for his memoir "Inside U.S.A." (1947), his suitcase bulged with W.P.A. Guides. So did John Steinbeck's when he set out to write "Travels With Charley: In Search of America" (1962).

"The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it," Steinbeck writes in the book. "It was compiled during the Depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating."

Steinbeck points out that many of the printing plates for the guides were smashed in the wake of a late-1930's witchhunt by Representative Martin Dies Jr., Democrat of Texas, who insisted that the W.P.A. was a Communist plot. But the Library of Congress has hundreds of boxes of the guides' raw material: correspondence, interview transcripts, slave narratives, research notes and photographs. It is one of the most underused and untapped historical collections in America.

With help from the library staff, Ms. Bordelon, for instance, unearthed tape recordings or transcripts of recordings of these Florida sources: Earltha White, who ran a soup kitchen in the slums of Jacksonville; a Cuban cigar maker from Ybor City; white squatters in the Everglades; Izzelly Haines, a midwife, who recalls delivering her first baby; and Norberto Diaz, whose tale of the race-related murder of a friend in Key West inspired Stetson Kennedy, a project folklorist, to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.

"Whenever anyone asks me what it was like working with the Works Progress Administration and recording Florida folk songs back in the 1930's for the Library of Congress," Mr. Kennedy once said in a radio broadcast, "I tell them we were as excited as a bunch of kids on a treasure hunt."

In "On Native Grounds" (1942), Alfred Kazin said the Writers' Project, originally a "drive toward national inventory which began by reporting the ravages of the Depression," ended with triumphant "reporting on the national inheritance." He concluded that it changed the course of American literature forever.

Douglas Brinkley is director of the Eisenhower Center and professor of history at the University of New Orleans.

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company

The Problem of the 21st Century

I knew it! Tom DeLay (R-TX) is pursuing an Identity politics agenda. Just as Identity religion (extreme Protestantism) seeks to marginalize non-whites in the United States. Hell, Identity religion advocates genocide (e.g., Timothy McVey). Identity politics — as practiced by Tom DeLay — will preserve lily-white Republican congressional seats in Texas. What irony! A century ago, the slogan among Texas blacks was The Republican Party is the ship, all else is the sea! Now, as envisioned by Tom DeLay, the sole Democrat seats will be elected by all-black or all-brown constituencies. The districting map of Texas (as envisioned by Tom DeLay) will create 20 white seats and 12 non-white seats. After the federal court drew the districting map of Texas after the the 2000 census, the by-elections of 2002 produced a Congressional delegation of 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans. The Lone Star State — in DeLay's monochrome view — went Republican because not a single Democrat won state-wide office in 2002. The Republicans held the Senate seat vacated by Phil Gramm (a great public servant — of Enron) with the election of John Cornyn. So, Tom DeLay has set about to undo the mischief of the federal courts (hated by those upholding the Identity ideology). This is the Southern Strategy with a new twist. It is not a coincidence that Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 campaign in Mississippi and W went to Bob Jones University in 2000. Tom DeLay is going to the next step: political apartheid. The problem of the 21st century will be the problem of the color line.

[x NYTimes]

August 2, 2003

Less Power, More Influence

By RICHARD H. PILDES


Three years into the new century, America continues to struggle over what W. E. B. DuBois famously called the problem of the last century: the problem of the color line. In several decisions at the end of its term, the Supreme Court pointed the way forward on two difficult issues: race and education, and race and politics.

The lines the court confronted were both metaphorical and literal. Making distinctions on the basis of race in university admissions is permissible, the court ruled. At the same time, it said, drawing "safe" legislative districts for black candidates is not as important as many liberals had argued. Although the court's decision upholding affirmative action received far more attention, its decision on voting rights is likely to have at least as much impact.

In Georgia v. Ashcroft, the Supreme Court opened a new era in the understanding of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most effective civil-rights law in American history. The court ruled that states may consider overall minority influence, and not just the number of minority voters, when redrawing legislative districts. In doing so, the conservatives on the court found themselves in agreement with the liberal black political leadership of Georgia.

Increasingly, struggles over voting rights pit "identity politics" against partisan politics. Georgia v. Ashcroft was typical: on one side stood the State of Georgia, where about 20 percent of the state legislators are black and where the Democratic Party, which black Georgians overwhelmingly support, controlled the legislative and executive branches. Pressed by its black leadership, Georgia abandoned some "safe" districts — those with a majority of black voters, in which a black candidate was almost certain to be elected — to create more integrated ones in which coalitions of whites and blacks would decide who won office. On the other side was the Justice Department, as well as groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the lower federal courts, which held that the Voting Rights Act required the creation of safe districts.

Of course, like all laws, the Voting Rights Act reflects the problems that shaped its creation. Last amended by Congress in 1982, the act was forged in a different America. Forty years ago, blacks were not permitted to vote in much of the South, an inequity that was the focus of the law.

Even 20 years ago, the South was dominated by the Democratic Party. The party had very little competition and even less incentive to be accountable. If party leaders wanted to exclude blacks from elective office, they could; they didn't need black support. Partly for this reason, the number of black elected officials was minuscule. Blacks, who constituted about 20 percent of the population in the South, had hardly any political influence.

In the 1980's, Congress and the courts therefore required "safe" minority districts, in which black voters would be able to elect their candidates regardless of how whites voted. But with some districts intentionally drawn to be dominated by blacks, surrounding districts became even more dominated by whites.

Many found this solution troubling — including supporters of race-conscious public policies, like affirmative action, in other areas. But in the electoral context of a generation ago, this approach seemed the only way to create equal opportunities for black voters in a one-party system.

The South of 2003 is vastly changed. The reign of the one-party monopoly has come to an end. Partly because of the success of the Voting Rights Act, a substantial number of black legislators now wield power, even in the Deep South. Moreover, despite the persistence of racially polarized voting, white voters no longer abandon the party when it nominates black candidates; strong black candidates regularly get about a third of the white vote. The era of interracial harmony has not yet arrived, but these are changes with cultural and legal consequence.

Appreciating these changes, Georgia's black legislators decided, virtually unanimously, to temper the single-minded pursuit of "safe" districts. When redistricting was required in the wake of the 2000 census, they put some of those safe districts at risk and endorsed districts in which interracial coalitions would decide elections.

The rise of two-party politics in the South helps explain why: a vibrant Republican Party now threatened to take over state government. That pressure united black and white Democrats. As black Democrats in Georgia saw it, what good are seats in a political body more hostile overall to the interests of black voters?

When no blacks held office, getting elected was the overriding goal. But now, being part of an effective governing coalition has begun to matter even more. White Democrats, disciplined by party competition, agree. Such political maneuvering might seem crass, but it is a hopeful sign that race is becoming just one of many elements in the routine struggles of politics.

The Supreme Court was remarkably astute about the new South's new politics. The Voting Rights Act, it ruled, does not require the election of black candidates for their own sake. Its purpose is to ensure equal opportunities and meaningful political influence and participation. If that goal is best realized by designing democratic institutions that foster interracial coalitions, the court concluded, the law should not stand in the way.

This is much the same as the court's approach in the affirmative action cases, in which it allowed university administrators flexibility to decide how much to weigh race in admission decisions. Similarly, in the most important voting-rights decision in a generation, the court concluded that the law did not dictate a single solution. The states now have some leeway to decide exactly what political equality means.

Difficult decisions lie ahead. As a first step toward a new understanding of political equality, Georgia v. Ashcroft was legally difficult, but practically easy; black legislators were not seriously at risk of losing in the less "safe," more integrated new districts. But as the four dissenters in the case worried, deciding what amounts to meaningful political power, and what tradeoffs to accept in pursuit of it, is fraught with controversy and uncertainty. Looming are more profound questions, like whether political equality may sometimes require black candidates giving up safe seats.

Partly because of the Voting Rights Act, black elected officials will be helping to decide which tradeoffs to make. With its decision, the Supreme Court has recognized that the relationship between politics and race in America has changed since 1965. The surest sign of this transformation is that today, it is Georgia that is leading the way in defining political equality.


Richard H. Pildes, professor at New York University School of Law, is co-author of Law and Democracy.

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company