1361
Communications
chapter are directed rather against the attempt by
Barbara Sands and Ramon Myers to discredit Skinner's macroregions argument.
What I find surprising about Faure's review is the
tone of malice that permeates it. Any author must be
prepared to hear negative reviews of his work;
Faure's review is, however, gratuitously offensive in
tone and shows a surprising lack of attention to the
substance of my argument. I can only interpret this
review as an expression of territoriality and an unwillingness to contemplate a contribution to the
China field by a philosopher.
DANIEL LITTLE
Harvard University
DAVID FAURE REPLIES:
I am sorry that Daniel Little is offended by my review
of his book. Nothing in his letter has made me change
my views. His allegations about my intentions are, of
course, quite unfounded.
gangsters said in candor, when they thought nobody
else was .listening: thousands of pages of bugged and
wiretapped conversations about the Mafia and its
operations.
Today, the Mafia no longer controls hard drugs.
and the Commission no longer meets every five years,
as it did for decades. But no one with an open mind
can read the RICO evidence and still doubt the
realities of the Mafia. Like the U.S. Congress, the
Mafia wields no absolute power, and many individuals defy its will. Everyone still agrees that Congress
exists. The Mafia's rogue elements and new underworld competitors do not disprove the existence of
the Mafia~specially when the Mafia kills them for
their defiance.
Journalists and law enforcers have understood this
situation for decades now. Academics drawing on
outmoded authorities still have not heard the news. I
can think of no starker dissonance between what
some academics think they know in here and what is
really going on out there.
DAVID FAURE
STEPHEN FOX
University of Oxford
Boston
BEVERLY SMITH REPLIES:
TO THE EDITOR:
Beverly A. Smith's review of my Blood and Power:
Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America quite misrepresents the book [AHR, 96 (April 1991): 625].
Smith says not a word about the book's two major
themes: the ethnic patterns of Irish, Jewish, and
Italian gangsters and WASP gangbusters, and the
underworld code that used to protect honest lawmen.
Thus Smith misses entirely my version of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The mob-specifically, it
appears, the Carlos Marcello family of New Orleans-killed Kennedy not just because of Robert
Kennedy's crusade against the underworld. It was
rather because the Kennedys were playing it both
ways, accepting secret help from the mob in the 1960
election and in the CIA plot to kill Castro and then
striking public postures against the underworld. This
amounted to a double cross, a deadly violation of the
underworld code, and resulted in a contract being
put on the president.
Blood and Power argues against the Mafia-as-myth
school of sociologists and historians, a group of
scholars that flourished two decades ago and has had
little new to say in the years since. Most academics
now plowing these fields, however, went to graduate
school in the 1960s and 1970s, and today they continue to doubt the existence of a national Mafia with
a ruling Commission at its core. This position has
been rendered obsolete by events of the last ten years,
especially the scores of RICO cases brought against
Mafia families around the country. As Smith suggests,
no scholar should blindly trust what gangsters said in
interviews, memoirs, or congressional testimony,
when they were fashioning statements for a particular
audience. The RICO trials have made available what
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Contrary to Steven Fox's comments. my review does
not deny the existence of organized crime. It does
exist and at great cost to this nation. My review
merely questions certain aspects of Fox's interpretation. RICO tapes, which Fox uses to advantage, are
often recorded under circumstances that are less than
ideal. Juries, as in recent John Gotti trials, have been
reluctant to accept garbled taped evidence. In addition, organized crime figures are generally aware that
their conversations may be recorded.
BEVERLY A. SMITH
Illinois State University,
Normal
ERRATUM
In the review of Francis L. Broderick's Progressivism at
Risk: Electing a President in 1912 (AHR, 96 [April
1991]: 628-29]), the following sentence appears:
"Aided by progressives in Congress in passing the
Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Amendments,
the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act, and the Child
Labor Act, Wilson gave progressivism an impetus that
lasted over sixty years."
Professor Bernard Sinsheimer, Department of History, University of Maryland, European Division,
reminded us that the Fifteenth Amendment was
ratified in 1870 during the presidency of Ulysses S.
Grant and that the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Amendments were proposed before the 1912 election, the Sixteenth ratified by February 25, 1913,
while William Howard Taft was still president.
The editors apologize for not catching these errors.
1991