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Conserving a Dream |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Thomas Deignan |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1997 |
| Size: 2,245 Words, 14,612 Characters |
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THE INHERITANCE
How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond
Samuel G. Freedman
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996
464 pp., $27.00
"Archie Bunker" remains a useful caricature for political writers because it neatly summarizes a distinct set of rather unfashionable political opinions. "Archie" is a white cultural conservative, disdainful of most of the reform movements of the 1960s, reflexively patriotic and jingoistic, quite racist, and suspicious of elitist "egghead" types, such as journalists and scholars.
In her groundbreaking literary investigation from 1993, Shelley Fisher Fishkin asked of Mark Twain's most famous character "Was Huck black?" Given the seismic shifts in cultural and political attitudes that have occurred in the last sixty years, maybe it's time to ask: "Was Archie Bunker Catholic?"
It seems a question innocuous, at best, and largely irrelevant, until we recall that Archie--reflecting the intense anti-Catholic strain in American history--did not like Catholics much more than he liked blacks, gays, draft dodgers, and the like. And yet, though dozens of books have been written about America's post-1960s shift to the right, only a select few authors have been perceptive enough to zero in on what could be the most profound factor of the Republican ascendancy: the shift in the Catholic vote. Forged by Nixon and Reagan and more or less completed in the 1994 Republican s...
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...f such a heartfelt connection to the Democrats, seems an undeniably critical event, for it touches many of the most fundamental issues of American cultural discourse. The New Deal reminds us that there was a time when the personal truly was political, and The Inheritance displays precisely how that era's offspring became, in Murray Kempton's phrase, "the children who devoured the revolution."
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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