Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  58. In a fall 1997 editorial, the Wall Street Journal attacked “universities and government” for having embraced multicultural “group” thinking and for “having been successfully intimidated by the diversity movement”; but no mention whatever was made of businesses, which have been at the forefront of the multicultural-diversity movement since the late 1980s, and have acted as its most influential advocates. For years, firms such as American Express and The St. Paul Companies have practiced diversity management for their workforce and multicultural marketing for their customers, aiming for complete “inclusiveness” and for bringing the “outsider inside.” In the last three years, American Express has established more than fifteen “Diversity Learning Labs” throughout the company, to ensure that it “focuses on diverse segments in the African-American, Gay and Lesbian, Hispanic, and women’s market.” (Quoted in “Diversity—Making the Business Case,” unpaginated advertising supplement, BusinessWeek, December 9, 1996.)

  But this practice had become so common by 1995 as to excite little surprise: what was surprising was the extent and sophistication of it. In the fall of 1996, for instance, corporations from coast to coast organized to carry their “in-house” diversity agenda into the “community.” In October, the CEOs of New Jersey’s major corporations, retailers, and banks joined together, under the auspices of The Partnership for New Jersey, in the publication of a major full-page document in the Wall Street Journal called the “Declaration of Diversity.” In its appearance it resembled the Declaration of Independence, bearing the same bold opening caption, the same sweeping phrases, and the same grouping of signatures at the bottom. Since 1987, these firms had practiced “in-house” diversity management; now, according to Richmond Rabinowitz, head of The Partnership for New Jersey, they had decided to carry their efforts into the community, realizing that “only there” would “real change” and a new mentality emerge.

  “We the undersigned,” it began, “believe” that everyone must “appreciate and celebrate the state’s growing diversity.” New Jerseyans, it said, must embrace the following key items: “acknowledge and respect differences”; “be sensitive to the many cultures in and beyond the workforces”; “avoid conduct that disadvantages any group”; and “encourage policies and practices that are truly inclusive.” “When we strive in the workplace to reduce bigotry and prejudice, the effort to recognize the full potential of an increasingly diverse workforce begins to succeed.” Richmond Rabinowitz, who wrote the document, culled the prose from the “in-house” diversity procedures of the firms themselves. The principal signers were the CEOs of Bell Atlantic, Kings Super Markets, Deloitte and Touche, Prudential Insurance Company, Johnson and Johnson, Merck and Co., and Poppe Tyson Advertising and Public Relations.

  59. By the mid-1990s, American financial firms dominated world markets; seven out of the ten major “merger advisers” in 1996 were American, and “the top global underwriters” were American (“U.S. Financial Firms’ Dominant Role in the World Markets,” WSJ, January 5, 1996, 1).

  60. Quoted in William C. Taylor and Alan M. Webber, Going Global (New York: Viking, 1996), p. 93; and, for biographical material, see Jason Zengerle, “Silicon Smoothies,” New Republic, June 8, 1998, 21; and “The ‘New Economy’ and Its Biggest Fan,” BusinessWeek, March 16, 1998, 29.

  61. Walter Wriston, The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), pp. 100, 61–62. For recent data on Citibank, see WSJ, December 29, 1997, A6, A8.

  62. Quoted in “Diversity—Making the Business Case.”

  63. Quoted in Taylor and Webber, Going Global, p. 22. On Whirlpool’s global expansion, see Chris Adams, “Hot Metal,” WSJ, August 26, 1997, 1.

  64. “Bellagio Fact Sheet,” press release and promotional literature, Mirage Resorts public relations; Robert Goodman, The Luck Business (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 58; and Sturges, quoted in NYT, March 24, 1994, B4.

  65. George Murchinson, introduction, Port of Long Beach 1996 Annual Report, 1.

  66. On the antiprovincialism of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, see Jameson Doig, “Regional Conflict in the New York Metropolis: The Legend of Robert Moses and the Power of the Port Authority,” Urban Studies 27:2 (April 1990), 201–32.

  67. The quote regarding these companies is from “Workers of the World,” The Economist, November 1, 1997, 82.

  68. From jacket blurb for Rosabeth Kanter’s World Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

  69. Barde, quoted in “Diversity—Making the Business Case”; the Childs quote appears in “Global Diversity,” unpaginated advertising supplement, BusinessWeek, December 1, 1997.

  70. “Celebrate Today, But Era Curbs Politicians’ Sway,” WSJ, November 11, 1996, A18; “Bob Dole and the Philistines,” WSJ, June 15, 1996, A12; and “ ‘No Guardrails’: Values Debate a Tectonic Clash,” April 15, 1993.

  71. In 1997, Dow Jones ceased publishing American Demographics; the Cowell Company now publishes it.

  72. Chip Walker and Elissa Moses, “The Age of Self-Navigation,” American Demographics, September 1996, 36.

  73. “Matters of Culture,” American Demographics, September 1997, 24–29.

  74. “The New Democrats Need to Sever Ties with Clinton,” WSJ, December 7, 1994, editorial; “A Union’s War on Workers,” WSJ, December 9, 1997, A22, editorial; and “Catching the Third Wave,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, February 6–12, 1995.

  75. Joel Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy (New York: Random House, 1993), pp. 3–4.

  76. Kotkin, Tribes, pp. 5–13.

  77. Kotkin, Tribes, p. 20.

  78. “The Post-Mall World,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1997, M1.

  79. Rosabeth Kanter, World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); all quotes come from this book. For a more recent statement by Kanter along the same lines, see her “Good for Them and Us,” NYT, May 12, 1998, A19.

  80. John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990), p. 195. Lukacs, in turn, was influenced by George Orwell’s 1945 essay, “Notes on Nationalism” in Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company), pp. 71–97.

  81. Arguments opposing this position abound, but see especially Michael Novak, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1993), and Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Both books are animated by a powerful, almost unquestioning faith in commercial capitalism.

  82. Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 1–11.

  CONCLUSION: VEBLEN REVISITED

  1. For a defense of this position, see David Rothenberg, associate professor of philosophy at New Jersey Institute of Technology, “The Sounds of Global Change: Different Beats, New Ideas,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 5, 1998, B8. “Indian, African, Greek, Lebanese, Korean, Japanese—I’ve got my whole class hearing and singing songs from cultures that somehow fit together,” says Rothenberg. “Sure, the world’s developing, and no tradition will stay the same. But diverse musical strains need not fade away into one global monotone. If there is such a thing as development, it will include a joyful and chaotic mix of many sounds, as music plays on while no one knows how it’s going to end.”

  2. William Trevor, Excursions in the Real World (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. xi; Alice James in Anna Robeson Burr, ed., Alice James, Her Brothers, Her Journal (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1934), p. 179.

  3. Quoted in Madeleine David and David Wallbridge, eds., Boundary and Space: An Introduction to the Work of D. W. Winnicott (New York: Brunner/Mazel Publishers, 1990), p. 151. The term “indestructibility” is Winnicott’s.

  4. J. B. Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 115.

  5. Josiah
Royce, Philosophy of Loyalty (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1908, 1995), pp. 115–16.

  6. The biographical material that follows here is taken from Joseph Dorfman’s Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York: Viking Press, 1934), pp. 3–10. I have interpreted this material, however, in my own way.

  7. Al. M. Bartel, “Thorstein B. Veblen, Homestead No Longer a Mystery,” Manitowac County Historical Society Newsletter (March 1980), pp. 6–8.