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half of the twentieth century. All his efforts were on
behalf of labor, the poor, minorities, and the environment. None had a better friend.
Burton achieved his goals through a combination of
intimidation and mastery of technical detail. He also
knew how to broker deals to achieve most of what he
desired. Fortunately, his reform efforts were funded by
decades of economic growth before the advent of
Ronald Reagan and the skyrocketing national debt
during his White House tenure. Burton died in 1983, at
the age of fifty-six, with less $1,000 in the bank and few
other assets.
At the outset, Burton covered his flank by creating a
safe district in San Francisco. His constituents were
the working poor: residents of Chinatown, recent
immigrants from Mexico and Central America in the
Mission District, blacks in Hunters Point, longshoremen, and others whom he brought together in coalitions. He created a power base that freed him from
seriously campaigning for reelection while providing
him with chits from candidates elsewhere who benefited from his efforts. He was a master of demographic
details, covering electoral districts throughout California and elsewhere. Following each census and after
some court decisions, Burton played a key role because
he knew more than most experts about shaping new
districts. He always sought to protect incumbents, but
the new districts usually elected Democrats.
As a legislator, poor people, workers, and racial
minorities were those Burton sought to assist. By
definition, corporate interests that he believed exploited people and the environment were his enemies.
In Sacramento and Washington, he played a key role
in welfare reform. In Washington, he could claim
credit for advancing the minimum wage, providing coal
miners with black-lung benefits, and introducing some
of the most extensive and complex environmental
protection laws. He was successful in bringing the most
diverse groups together to work out mutually beneficial details: gays and the police in San Francisco,
timber companies and loggers in the Pacific Northwest,
and conservative southerners and liberals in the
House, among others.
In addition, Burton sparked momentous changes in
House procedures. He waged a gigantic fifteen-month
struggle to gain the post of majority leader, a steppingstone to becoming Speaker of the House. By nurturing
the growth and functions of the Democratic Study
Group and transferring power to make committee
assignments from the Ways and Means Committee to
a new Steering and Policy Committee, Burton and his
liberal colleagues were able to destroy the seniority
system. Emboldened by success, Burton further challenged the leadership by seeking to succeed Thomas
("Tip") O'Neill as Majority Leader. He lost by one
vote in a lengthy contest that rivaled in intensity the
battle earlier in the century to curb the power of the
speaker. Rather than sulk over his narrow defeat,
Burton devoted his efforts as chairman of the Subcommittee on National Parks and Insular Affairs to ex-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
pan ding and restoring Redwood National Park, along
with other preservation matters. He "preserved more
national park and wilderness land than all presidents
and congresses before him combined" (p. 352). Burton
was, in the words of Senator Gaylord Nelson of
Wisconsin, an "absolute political genius" (p. vii).
Jacobs, a seasoned political reporter with long experience in Sacramento and a year with the Washington Post, brought more than his experience as a
journalist to this assignment. He mined the Burton
papers, read widely and deeply, and interviewed
hordes of people in California and Washington. The
result is a significant political study that is both broadly
researched (thirty-eight pages of notes plus a twelvepage bibliography) and written in a clear, concise style
so that intricate legislative maneuvering and complex
measures are easily understood.
RICHARD LOWITT
University of Oklahoma
LoUIS A. DECARO, JR .. On the Side of My People: A
Religious Life of Malcolm X. New York: New York
University Press. 1996. Pp. xvi, 363. $29.95.
The many lives of Malcolm X pose a formidable
challenge to biographers, who must link his roles as
adolescent assimilationist, young adult ghetto hustler,
convict-turned-religious ascetic, acid emissary to white
America, disillusioned and dispossessed cult member,
pilgrim to Mecca, and free-floating activist bent on a
fresh path to black liberation. Among studies that seek
a unifying core to Malcolm's diverse incarnations,
Peter Goldman's The Death and Life of Malcolm X
(1973) depicts a black intellectual revolutionary in
successive embryonic states; Eugene Victor Wolfenstein's The Victims of Democracy (1983) offers a psychoanalytic and Marxist view of Malcolm's quest for
meaning and justice; James H. Cone's Martin and
Malcolm and America (1991) finds a theological link
between the freedom struggles of Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King, lr.; and Bruce Perry's Malcolm
(1991) debunks his subject's autobiographical claims
while presenting Malcolm as trapped by severe personal frailties. Now Louis A. DeCaro, lr., gives us
unexampled coverage of Malcolm's spiritual journeys
in order to explain a man who was "as concerned with
redemption as with revolution" (p. 2).
This book centers on "Malcolm's two conversions"
(p. 2), first to the black separatist Nation of Islam in
1948, while he was in prison for burglary; and then, in
1964, toward the end of his life, to traditional Islam.
DeCaro, a Harlem-based evangelical Christian minister, lauds Malcolm's embrace of "orthodox" Islam as
crucial to his moral and even political growth while
lamenting that "his previous religious commitment to
Elijah Muhammad," by limiting his contacts with Islam
abroad and with struggles for justice at home, "greatly
hindered or misdirected his personal religious and
intellectual life" (pp. 209-10).
The book's interpretive paths have already been well
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Reviews of Books
traversed by Goldman, Cone, and others. StilI, DeCaro
explores some intriguing byways. Contrary to Malcolm's autobiographical penitence for a decadent and
aimless life until he was "saved" by Elijah Muhammad,
DeCaro documents Malcolm's black nationalist activism even when he was hustling on the streets of Boston
(pp. 57-58). He details, as well, how Malcolm early
and lastingly absorbed the spiritual openness of his
mother, the Garvey-inflected preaching of his father,
and the internationalist approach to race matters of
both parents. Although for twelve years Elijah Muhammad channeled Malcolm's ongoing spiritual and
racial concerns, he by no means exhausted his protege's capacity for growth.
DeCaro ably mines Malcolm's correspondence, FBI
and police surveillance documents, prison and parole
files, and other archives. His personal contacts also
confirm accounts in Malcolm's autobiography that
Perry had earlier questioned, such as a Klan attack on
his childhood home in Omaha, Nebraska (p. 44). Still,
DeCaro's claim that "while I cannot boast hundreds of
interviews" like rival scholar Perry, "my interview[s)
have been more than compensated by their depth and
quality" (p. xii) seems to stretch his loaves and fishes a
bit far. Scholars will also wish that the book's rich
citations were more tightly ordered: notes are located
erratically through the text, with a single note often
grouping sources for many quotations and claims.
Despite these venial sins, which closer editing should
purge for a paperback cdition, DeCaro effectively
conveys Malcolm's evolving spirituality and why it was
arguably as central to his life as his far better known
activist concerns.
ROBERT WEISBROT
Colby College
DAVID A. HOLLINGER. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: BasicBooks. 1995. Pp. xii, 210.
$22.00.
Half a century after the appearance of the word in
Edward Haskell's novel Lance: A Novel about Multicultural Men (1941), the term "multicultural" has come
into vogue. Today multiculturalism suggests a vision of
the United States in the shape of what David A.
Hollinger calls an "ethnoracial pentagon" (p. 8) that
divides the population into African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and EuroAmericans. How is it possible that though old racial
biology is intellectually bankrupt, the pentagon eerily
resembles race categories of black, brown, red, yellow,
and white taken to represent different "cultures"
within the United States?
The subtitle of Hollinger's book promises a move
"beyond multiculturalism," and he presents the issues
that make multiculturalism problematic. In its practical enactment, the pentagon inhibits mixed, double, or
multiple affiliations, and what Hollinger calls "Haley's
choice"-alluding to Alex Haley's quest in Roots for
his African but not his Irish ancestry-limits genealog-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ical identifications to only one of five pentagon-certified "races." The pentagon's apparent stability is challenged by the internal heterogeneity of each
component, the historical vagaries of assignation, and
the growing momentum for mixed-race classification.
Affiliations are not just ascribed, but also made
(though whites have had more ethnic options than
others). If racism is real, but races are not (p. 46), how
could a better political and scholarly practice and a
realistic sense of national identity be engendered?
How wide can the circle of "we" be extended,
Hollinger asks, drawing on Edwin Markham's decanonized poem "The Man with the Hoe" (1899).
Hollinger distinguishes the "postethnic perspective," a turn toward a new cosmopolitanism that he
advocates, from the pre-ethnic orientation of the time
when The Family of Man (1955) or the Kinsey reports
tended to de-emphasize ethnicity but at times confused the local with the universal in making generalizations about the human species. In showing how this
paradigm was discredited as a nationalist equivalent of
a universalism that denies diversity, Hollinger also
differentiates the old pluralism from multiculturalism
(the latter rightly pays more attention to social inequality) and focuses on the "diversification of diversity" in the postmodern period. Hollinger does not
propose a "return" to pre-ethnic beliefs in universal
oneness. He wants scholarship to be informed both by
the historically documented and actually existing cultural, linguistic, and religious heterogeneity, and by the
treatment of ethnic identity as a question, not as a
given. Thus the postethnic perspective breathes fresh
air into the stale ethnoracial pentagon without simply
reviving a problematic position of the past. It combines
the positive features of new and old paradigms, for it
"recognizes the psychological value and political function of bounded groups of affiliation, but it resists a
rigidification of the ascribed distinctions between persons that universalists and cosmopolitans have so long
sought to diminish" (p. 107).
Hollinger mentions in passing that the immigrants of
the 1920s may have been more multicultural than is
believed, "measured by foreign-language newspapers
and publishing houses" (p. 152). The issue of language
may actually suggest continuity from "Anglo-conformity" to the present, which raises the question of
whether multiculturalism has largely been an English
(and-a-little-Spanish)-only movement that exaggerates
cultural differences between the parts of the pentagon
while paying little or no attention to the well-documented linguistic diversity in the United States, past
and present, from Algonquin to Vietnamese. Since
language is the cultural medium in which circles of the
"we" are often spun, failing to study sources in socalled "foreign languages" may make scholarly practice if not "pre-ethnic" then at least "pre-multicultural."
Hollinger makes a convincing case, and I hope that
his manifesto will be widely adopted. This book is
suggestive for scholars and students who take seriously
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