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LETTERS FROM PAPA

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THE REAL DAISY BUCHANAN?

SUMMER READING

Summer is a time for most of us to catch up on our reading. Here is just a small sampling of some new books by professors in the College of the Liberal Arts. Each of these works are timely, provocative, and accessible, and represent the type of relevant engagement our faculty are engaged in.

The Behavioral Origins of War
D. Scott Bennett
University of Michigan Press

A new book by D. Scott Bennett, Liberal Arts Research Professor of Political Science at Penn State, and Allan C. Stam, Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, looks at what makes a country more prone to go to war. Policy makers and political scientists have long theorized that particular factors make a country more susceptible to conflict. Gleaned from past proven data, Bennett and Stam examined fifteen factors that some believe have contributed to countries' historical decisions to go to war, including the balance of power, nuclear deterrence, democracy, arms races, and alliances (among others). After quantifying these factors and assigning them numeric measures, Bennett and Stam created statistical models to gain a better insight into which of these behaviors will present the highest risks of war.  

Because government policy is often established based on theories about the causes and behaviors leading up to war, it is essential to validate those theories.

 "Our goal was to bring together all of these competing argument—or theories—in one place, and test them against one another," Bennett explains. "For fifty years people have been saying 'it's the balance of power that determines war', or 'it's the arms race,' but have not used real evidence to test their assertions. We did a much more comprehensive test than anyone in the field has done before to establish which factors really matter."  

Health Security For All
Alan Derickson
The John Hopkins University Press

The United States enters the twenty-first century as the only developed nation not to guarantee its citizens access to basic health services. The many and varied proposals for universal health care in the United States are the subject of the latest book by Alan Derickson, professor of history at Penn State. In a succinct 165 pages, Derickson traces the invention and reinvention of the egalitarian ideal over the course of the past century. The book focuses not so much on the well-known political defeats of national health insurance legislation as on the persistent efforts of reform champions across the ideological spectrum to extend social protection to the working poor.

Derickson believes that reaching any approximation of universal health security will require a mass movement of the uninsured, who now number more than 45 million. He points out that organizing and sustaining such movement among a diffuse group of disadvantaged individuals will be difficult but not impossible.

From Welfare To Workfare
Jennifer Mittelstadt
The University of North Carolina Press

In 1996 Congress and President Bill Clinton “ended welfare as we know it,” and established “workfare,” thereby canceling the sixty-year old guaranteed federal safety net for the poor. An examination of the origins of this legislation, and especially the role liberals played in its history and shifting public perception, is the topic of Jennifer Mittelstadt's new book.

In the 1930s and early 1940s, there was a perceptible shift in how the public perceived the poor that, Mittelstadt contends, sowed the seeds for current perceptions.

“Up until the middle 1940s, there was a general notion that poverty was caused by general societal factors, that it was not an individual's ‘fault,' and there was not a feeling that women on welfare should work,” says Mittelstadt, assistant professor of history and women's studies at Penn State. “After the war and especially in the 1950s, there was a move towards ‘rehabilitation' of women on welfare. This was a dramatic break with notions of the past.”

A coalition of liberal groups wanted to see the welfare program, Aid To Dependent Children (ADC), offer more individualized help in trying to bring people out of poverty and eventually mainstream them back into society. Their efforts were called ‘rehabilitative,' with individualized counseling among other tools. But as poverty rates remained stubborn and more and more nonwhite single mothers appeared on welfare roles, reformers increasingly emphasized using rehabilitative efforts to move women from “dependence” on welfare to “independence,” largely by encouraging them to work outside the home. A mandatory work law was just a matter of time, Mittelstadt believes.

“Liberals' efforts to help poor women created unintended consequences that played right into conservative hands,” she says. “My book examines all the factors by which this happened and how much of our current notions of the welfare poor have been shaped by gendered and racialized assumptions.”

Writing JFK: Presidential Rhetoric and the Press in the Bay of Pigs Crisis
Thomas W. Benson
Texas A&M University Press

After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, John Kennedy gave two speeches and a press conference. Tom Benson, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communications Arts and Sciences, focuses on these speeches—which were given to two press associations—in a short exploration of the unique place Presidential rhetoric holds in our country. Benson demonstrates how the “two-way street” that exists between a President and the press, serves to help construct the quasi-mythology of the Presidential persona. The speeches illustrate the complex collaboration of Kennedy, his speech writers, and the press to create an image of the President as a political and moral agent.

“Here we have Kennedy, a day or two after people have realized the disastrous Bay of Pigs failure, speaking before American Society of Newspaper Editors and trying to give an account of what happened,” says Benson. “Eventually, it becomes an object lesson and also serves the press's growing avidity for personal stories about the President. And this story is about a smart, decent young man who is mastering the office and who made a mistake.”

Benson's book, while focusing on these historical speeches, encourages provocative and timely parallels with our current perceptions of the President and the press, and the resulting effects upon politics and public policy.