THE LEVELING WIND: POLITICS, THE CULTURE & OTHER NEWS1990-1994 is a 1994 collection of columns, commencement
addresses and other essays by George F. Will, conservatism's most
articulate spokesman. In his "Introduction" Will declares himself
surprised at how, over the years, he had written more and more about " writings" rather than simply about  "straight news" or "issues." 
 

"I am struck," Will says, "by how much I am now writing about books. That is as it should be in an era when the condition of the culture, and the culture's consequences, 
are national preoccupations. Many books should be treated, journalistically, as news events. History is the history of ideas, and...books are still the primary carries of ideas." 

What is the difference? Typically, in a column a writer uses the contents of a book he is writing about as a launching pad to stimulate his own subjective or personal reflections on what he has read. The book review, by contrast, stays close to the test and arguments of the book. Nor need the reviewer  say whether he likes the book or recommends it. Mainly a good reviewer simply describes the book. 

In the spirit of that distinction, here below is a column about a thought-provoking book. 

                                  Anna Eleanor Roosevelt

Books abound about Anna Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband (and
fifth cousin twice removed) Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Eleanor, as 
readers increasingly accept, was a powerful political personality and
might have been a political force with or without her marriage to the
President. 

Of the President it has been said that all that mattered to him in a
policy was ending up where he intended to end up.  Like the
helmsman of a sailing ship, FDR would tack to starboard or port, turn
around and go backwards. No matter. He knew where he wanted to go
and he got there more often than not. Franklin, that is, was pragmatic 
and the master of compromise. 

Eleanor was cut from a different mold. She was not much good at zigging and zagging. She was not great at holding her tongue or her
typewriter even when her husband bade her do so.  She was an
American liberal everywhere and always, open, fearless, rarely
backing off from confrontations. She pledged her troth early on to
liberalism and never broke it.  This is the theme of a 1996 book by
Alida M. Black of George Washington University called 
CASTINGHER OWN SHADOW: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT AND THE SHAPING OF POSTWAR LIBERALISM. 

Eleanor Roosevelt (or "ER" as she often signed her notes to her husband) outlived the President by 17 years. He was struck down on
April 12, 1945. She died November 7, 1962, allowing her ample time to interact with and at times be a thorn in the sides of Presidents Truman,
Eisenhower and  Kennedy. 

Two themes, civil rights and civil liberties, run through Alida Black's 
biography of Mrs Roosevelt. 

First, very citizen has certain political rights: to vote, to petition, to find equal justice before the law. ER believed that every person has the right not to be lynched.  She held that it was wrong to intern Japanese Americans in California (but, after one or two initial shows of solidarity, uncharacteristically backed off into silence because her husband angrily asserted that national securit demanded their internment). 

She also stood up for decent, equal social treatment of black people long before it became the fashion. When the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow the great black contralto Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall on Easter weekend 1939, ER  wrotesharply on the subject in her column "My Day," and resigned her DAR membership. She then invited Marian Anderson to the White House to sing for visiting British Royalty. Over the decades she proved probably the best friend in high places which the National Association for the advancement of Colored Peopl (NAACP) ever had.

          The Methodological Importance of a "Pure" Position

I was a graduate student at the University of Texas when John Silber headed the department of philosophy. Later he became the
controversial President of Boston University, where he now serves as
Chancellor. Of books Silber used to say: 

"at some point you simply have to pick up a book you have never seen and read it just as it is written, without first reading a commentary on the book": 

"state it as universally and as clearly as you can, without provisos or compromises." That way, you can test it rationally, verify it or falsify it."

In philosophy's parallel universe of politics it is not easy to find persons who are pure this or pure that. Is Bill Clinton a pure liberal or a hybrid new Democrat or a trimmer? Is Pat Buchanan a pure Jeffersonian? Is Ross Perot a libertarian? 

Those questions are hard to answer. But was Eleanor Roosevelt a liberal? You bet! People, she felt, are basically good and their happiness and success become likely once a benign and activist government courgeously whittles away at bad private attitudes and conditions holding down the disadvantaged. There was once a person
in public life, no matter what you think of her views, who embodied
American liberalism more purely and radiantly than any other. Small wonder that Hillary Clinton, another nearly pure liberal, enjoys
communing with ER. The shadow meets the shadow caster. 

Thank you, Eleanor Roosevelt, for being who you were. Fifty years ago you completed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, your
liberal legacy as "First Lady of the World." 

-000- 

for the Asheville TRIBUNE