Salon | Letters to the editor

_______________WILL MOTHER JONES BECOME MORE POLITICALLY CORRECT? BY ASHLEY CRADDOCK (08/24/98)

Ashley Craddock, who wrote "Will Mother Jones become more politically correct?" was an intern at Mother Jones for a year, an accomplished one, I always thought. But the magazine and I (I was an art director, creative director and executive editor there over a 10-year period) apparently failed her in basic training. Her article is not only a grotesquely biased account of the magazine's recent history, apparently based on chats with her unnamed circle of friends, but is riddled with factual errors. She does not acknowledge her closeness to the story and a particular group of participants with axes to grind. Most egregiously, she declined to interview principal figures, like me, who she must have known would disagree with the cozy consensus of her social group. Thus, she violates basic standards of journalism that I'd hoped we inculcated at Mother Jones, and her editors let her get away with it.
Adam Hochschild, a founder and the long-time funder of Mother Jones, is depicted (without any apparent attempt to get a response from him) as an ideological die-hard who ousted the ever-brave and free-thinking editor, Jeffrey Klein. Perhaps. But the two of them have a rivalry of more than two decades in duration and Greek in its proportions, one riddled with professional and personal jealousies over money and power. As a result, Craddock misses many of the central dimensions of the story. The 1997 deficit, for instance, was in large part a result of a significant decline in Hochschild's contribution. This could have been made up by the board -- formerly a group of Adam's friends, but now an extremely wealthy group with different views of the magazine's role, and not a few rivalries. Klein lost a power struggle in which he tried to fashion a new board coalition against Adam's still powerful group. Craddock gives us the intern's-eye view, based on the after-work grumbling of her buddies over microbrewed pints.
Craddock's portrait of me and my tenure as editor is an insulting caricature drawn in large part by friends of hers who resented my promotion to head the editorial department (in 1996, when Klein's wife grew sick and died, not 1997 as reported). Klein's charismatic, almost guru style of leadership bred fierce loyalties and equally deep insecurities on the part of some younger staff members. At his best, he inspired people to outperform themselves. But it was also a regime based on fear and rivalry, and it led to cruelties. In the year before he left, he and I had been tag-teaming on many of the magazine's major stories. I won the respect of some of my colleagues, but others could not put aside their irritation that a former art director had taken on such a major editorial role, nor cope with Jeffrey's departure. They were also deeply upset, as I was, over his personal tragedy.
I couldn't be (and didn't want to be) Jeffrey Klein. Our editorial concerns had a different cast. My principal concern (which I shared with Klein, but which Craddock characteristically attributes to him), was to provoke a discussion of a new American progressivism that could revive itself in the next century. Dating from the mid-1970s, I viewed the American left as, with some exceptions, being in a period of broad decline. The left has yet to fully confront the failures of socialism and Marxism. It put aside any real interest in a reform agenda in favor of nostalgia for a chimerical revolutionary solution, or worse, for nihilistic accounts of "capitalist and patriarchal hegemony" issued by tenured professors. It had failed to address the disparities of wealth that have developed with reforms that could win broad support, preferring to battle on the treacherous cultural terrain of gender and race.
To achieve my goals, I ran a series of articles that challenged left shibboleths and suggested meaningful reforms. Paul Hawken contributed a major piece on emerging innovations in the areas of ecological economics and resource efficiency. It addressed the central question of how we can possibly sustain large increases in global population and pursue development in poor countries without collapsing our natural systems. The article became a popular reprint, distributed by dozens of schools and organizations, including the president's council on sustainability. In front of the Sierra Club board, David Brower called Hawken's article the most important one on environmentalism in years. Ashley Craddock called it "about as alluring as tucking into a plate of day-old liver."
I convinced top-flight political writers like Michael Lind and Walter Russell Meade -- who were skeptical -- that Mother Jones wanted to encourage a more wide-ranging and fundamental discussion of the meaning and possibilities of progressivism. Lind contributed an innovative series of articles on political reform (e.g., how about dividing California into six states to address the white, conservative drift in the way the Senate is elected?). Meade wrote a trenchant analysis of globalization that challenged the left's default positions on free trade.
Lind also wrote a closely reasoned analysis of the profoundly misguided assumptions at the heart of the left's favored "rainbow" politics, the idea that "people of color" will lead a new and powerful left coalition against Europhile America. He showed how this myopia has led and will lead progressives to disempowerment and ethnic conflict. In the apparently infamous "race" issue, under the influence of post-ethnic writers like Jorge Klor de Alva, David Hollinger, Richard Rodriguez and Randall Kennedy, I tried to suggest a politics that, while recognizing past racial injustices, created the possibility that people's life choices could be less and less determined by their membership in a racial or ethnic group. Among other things, such a politics would have to account for the fast-changing complexion of America's ethnic/racial groups, and relearn the distinction between "culture" and "race." In particular, we need a more sophisticated understanding of Mexico and Mexicans.
While I never felt the caliber of intellectual or political discussion at Mother Jones to be that high, the response to this issue was particularly dismaying. Mainly, it was attacked for having too many white writers (and even mischaracterized as having only white voices). I never heard a serious engagement of Lind's arguments; he was usually just attacked for being white. Staff and board members were "embarrassed" by the issue because its challenge to affirmative action discomfited them, not, as Craddock suggests, because the issue lacked political sophistication.
Undoubtedly, the issue had many inadequacies and shortcomings. Probably its biggest mistake was the overblown idea that any editor could do justice to the topic in an issue. But I also got an object lesson in the limits of Mother Jones culture, and just how sacred sacred cows can be. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that I was vilified for my efforts. I was certainly canned for them.
Craddock is correct that the race issue, and the one on spirituality that followed, incensed some members of the board. I can't claim credit for the spirituality issue, though I thought it was well done. It was mandated by Klein (the same guy Craddock claims eschews soul-searching essays for hard-edged political investigations) and brilliantly executed by Marilyn Snell. The criticism of it, repeated by Craddock, that spirituality has nothing to do with progressivism, and had no place in the magazine, is narrow and dumb. The names of Frederick Douglass, Mohandas Gandhi, Carry Nation, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Dalai Lama come to mind.
All of the above is characterized by Craddock as the "predictable" output of a "New Age granola muncher with no interest in investigative work and little understanding of politics." As one of the few people at Mother Jones who had had any real and broad involvement with movements, organizations, left publications (I helped start two of them), electoral campaigns and the like over a 25-year period, the last charge is a little irritating. No one with any real acquaintance with my record or character could honestly describe me in the way she does. The unnamed (may I say "gutless"?) colleague who did was clearly acting out of politically correct arrogance and professional jealousy.
While it is true that I am not an investigative journalist, nor particularly skilled in that area, I did lead at least one significant investigation with a noticeable political impact, about the attack on Social Security led by financial interests who stand to make billions if it is privatized. I also played an important role in the much-heralded tobacco exposé. I certainly tried to encourage Kerry Lauerman, who was put in charge of our investigations. This accusation is also a little hard to take from Craddock. I spent days with her on the big investigation she did at Mother Jones, patiently trying to turn her complex story into a compelling presentation in the magazine. It was my job, but I was also trying to encourage a young talent who I thought might turn into an effective reporter.
Craddock underestimates the intellectual courage that was required to confront the limitations of Mother Jones' political culture, and that of the broader remains of the New Left establishment. By trying to paint me as a know-nothing art director wrongly given editorial responsibility, she suggests I was fired for incompetence, while crediting Klein with bravely challenging the board. Ironically, she does so based on articles mostly done on my watch (no board member objected to the Gingrich or tobacco exposés). This is painfully, grossly insulting to me. That she did so based on talking to her pals, and refusing me the dignity of responding, is just shoddy.
One thing Craddock does seem to have picked up during her training at Mother Jones is the smug know-it-all attitude that I've always thought was the worst feature of the magazine's voice. This attitude is the true anti-politics that has cut Mother Jones off from real engagement, and fostered the irrelevancy she bemoans. It is cynical and destructive, a defense against doubt masked as superior wisdom. I hope it's not too late for her to learn a different, more professional style.
-- Kerry Tremain
Berkeley, Calif.

_______________SLAVES TO THE SYSTEM BY NINA SIEGAL (09/01/98)

Nina Siegal documents incidents of women who are abused while in jail and indicts the whole corrections system for this. Why wasn't this a problem all the time men were being assaulted, raped, knifed and killed while in prison? This has never been a secret: Men are abused daily, and guards won't interfere. Society at large has known this, and few ever speak up.
While the big push is to "let the young suffer the consequences of their action," any good criminal attorney will advise parents not to leave a teenage boy in jail for anything short of a major felony because the risks are too high. Most people think of a jail as a place where people are locked in little cages. This is far from the truth; prisoners are taken out for medical treatment, court dates, training, rehab services, working, etc. It is a jungle.
Many people think that, since these are criminals, they get what they deserve. Really? Does a 16-year-old boy who was caught with liquor deserve to be raped? Does a 15-year-old who was shoplifting deserve to be knifed?
The popular view seems to be that women are put in prison for something that isn't really their fault -- society made them do it. Women only need love and understanding to become better citizens. This thinking is what leads to women's prisons without lock-down facilities or proper emergency procedures.
Women don't deserve this treatment, but men don't either. Why didn't Ms. Siegal protest when it was mostly men being abused, instead of letting the situation grow until it became acceptable to abuse any prisoners?
-- John Chesman
Monroe, Mich.
SALON | Sept. 9, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| FIELD OF PILLS BY TOM McNICHOL

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_______________WILL MOTHER JONES BECOME MORE POLITICALLY CORRECT? BY ASHLEY CRADDOCK (08/24/98)
	Ashley Craddock, who wrote "Will Mother Jones become more politically correct?" was an intern at Mother Jones for a year, an accomplished one, I always thought. But the magazine and I (I was an art director, creative director and executive editor there over a 10-year period) apparently failed her in basic training. Her article is not only a grotesquely biased account of the magazine's recent history, apparently based on chats with her unnamed circle of friends, but is riddled with factual errors. She does not acknowledge her closeness to the story and a particular group of participants with axes to grind. Most egregiously, she declined to interview principal figures, like me, who she must have known would disagree with the cozy consensus of her social group. Thus, she violates basic standards of journalism that I'd hoped we inculcated at Mother Jones, and her editors let her get away with it. Adam Hochschild, a founder and the long-time funder of Mother Jones, is depicted (without any apparent attempt to get a response from him) as an ideological die-hard who ousted the ever-brave and free-thinking editor, Jeffrey Klein. Perhaps. But the two of them have a rivalry of more than two decades in duration and Greek in its proportions, one riddled with professional and personal jealousies over money and power. As a result, Craddock misses many of the central dimensions of the story. The 1997 deficit, for instance, was in large part a result of a significant decline in Hochschild's contribution. This could have been made up by the board -- formerly a group of Adam's friends, but now an extremely wealthy group with different views of the magazine's role, and not a few rivalries. Klein lost a power struggle in which he tried to fashion a new board coalition against Adam's still powerful group. Craddock gives us the intern's-eye view, based on the after-work grumbling of her buddies over microbrewed pints. Craddock's portrait of me and my tenure as editor is an insulting caricature drawn in large part by friends of hers who resented my promotion to head the editorial department (in 1996, when Klein's wife grew sick and died, not 1997 as reported). Klein's charismatic, almost guru style of leadership bred fierce loyalties and equally deep insecurities on the part of some younger staff members. At his best, he inspired people to outperform themselves. But it was also a regime based on fear and rivalry, and it led to cruelties. In the year before he left, he and I had been tag-teaming on many of the magazine's major stories. I won the respect of some of my colleagues, but others could not put aside their irritation that a former art director had taken on such a major editorial role, nor cope with Jeffrey's departure. They were also deeply upset, as I was, over his personal tragedy. I couldn't be (and didn't want to be) Jeffrey Klein. Our editorial concerns had a different cast. My principal concern (which I shared with Klein, but which Craddock characteristically attributes to him), was to provoke a discussion of a new American progressivism that could revive itself in the next century. Dating from the mid-1970s, I viewed the American left as, with some exceptions, being in a period of broad decline. The left has yet to fully confront the failures of socialism and Marxism. It put aside any real interest in a reform agenda in favor of nostalgia for a chimerical revolutionary solution, or worse, for nihilistic accounts of "capitalist and patriarchal hegemony" issued by tenured professors. It had failed to address the disparities of wealth that have developed with reforms that could win broad support, preferring to battle on the treacherous cultural terrain of gender and race. To achieve my goals, I ran a series of articles that challenged left shibboleths and suggested meaningful reforms. Paul Hawken contributed a major piece on emerging innovations in the areas of ecological economics and resource efficiency. It addressed the central question of how we can possibly sustain large increases in global population and pursue development in poor countries without collapsing our natural systems. The article became a popular reprint, distributed by dozens of schools and organizations, including the president's council on sustainability. In front of the Sierra Club board, David Brower called Hawken's article the most important one on environmentalism in years. Ashley Craddock called it "about as alluring as tucking into a plate of day-old liver." I convinced top-flight political writers like Michael Lind and Walter Russell Meade -- who were skeptical -- that Mother Jones wanted to encourage a more wide-ranging and fundamental discussion of the meaning and possibilities of progressivism. Lind contributed an innovative series of articles on political reform (e.g., how about dividing California into six states to address the white, conservative drift in the way the Senate is elected?). Meade wrote a trenchant analysis of globalization that challenged the left's default positions on free trade. Lind also wrote a closely reasoned analysis of the profoundly misguided assumptions at the heart of the left's favored "rainbow" politics, the idea that "people of color" will lead a new and powerful left coalition against Europhile America. He showed how this myopia has led and will lead progressives to disempowerment and ethnic conflict. In the apparently infamous "race" issue, under the influence of post-ethnic writers like Jorge Klor de Alva, David Hollinger, Richard Rodriguez and Randall Kennedy, I tried to suggest a politics that, while recognizing past racial injustices, created the possibility that people's life choices could be less and less determined by their membership in a racial or ethnic group. Among other things, such a politics would have to account for the fast-changing complexion of America's ethnic/racial groups, and relearn the distinction between "culture" and "race." In particular, we need a more sophisticated understanding of Mexico and Mexicans. While I never felt the caliber of intellectual or political discussion at Mother Jones to be that high, the response to this issue was particularly dismaying. Mainly, it was attacked for having too many white writers (and even mischaracterized as having only white voices). I never heard a serious engagement of Lind's arguments; he was usually just attacked for being white. Staff and board members were "embarrassed" by the issue because its challenge to affirmative action discomfited them, not, as Craddock suggests, because the issue lacked political sophistication. Undoubtedly, the issue had many inadequacies and shortcomings. Probably its biggest mistake was the overblown idea that any editor could do justice to the topic in an issue. But I also got an object lesson in the limits of Mother Jones culture, and just how sacred sacred cows can be. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that I was vilified for my efforts. I was certainly canned for them. Craddock is correct that the race issue, and the one on spirituality that followed, incensed some members of the board. I can't claim credit for the spirituality issue, though I thought it was well done. It was mandated by Klein (the same guy Craddock claims eschews soul-searching essays for hard-edged political investigations) and brilliantly executed by Marilyn Snell. The criticism of it, repeated by Craddock, that spirituality has nothing to do with progressivism, and had no place in the magazine, is narrow and dumb. The names of Frederick Douglass, Mohandas Gandhi, Carry Nation, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Dalai Lama come to mind. All of the above is characterized by Craddock as the "predictable" output of a "New Age granola muncher with no interest in investigative work and little understanding of politics." As one of the few people at Mother Jones who had had any real and broad involvement with movements, organizations, left publications (I helped start two of them), electoral campaigns and the like over a 25-year period, the last charge is a little irritating. No one with any real acquaintance with my record or character could honestly describe me in the way she does. The unnamed (may I say "gutless"?) colleague who did was clearly acting out of politically correct arrogance and professional jealousy. While it is true that I am not an investigative journalist, nor particularly skilled in that area, I did lead at least one significant investigation with a noticeable political impact, about the attack on Social Security led by financial interests who stand to make billions if it is privatized. I also played an important role in the much-heralded tobacco exposé. I certainly tried to encourage Kerry Lauerman, who was put in charge of our investigations. This accusation is also a little hard to take from Craddock. I spent days with her on the big investigation she did at Mother Jones, patiently trying to turn her complex story into a compelling presentation in the magazine. It was my job, but I was also trying to encourage a young talent who I thought might turn into an effective reporter. Craddock underestimates the intellectual courage that was required to confront the limitations of Mother Jones' political culture, and that of the broader remains of the New Left establishment. By trying to paint me as a know-nothing art director wrongly given editorial responsibility, she suggests I was fired for incompetence, while crediting Klein with bravely challenging the board. Ironically, she does so based on articles mostly done on my watch (no board member objected to the Gingrich or tobacco exposés). This is painfully, grossly insulting to me. That she did so based on talking to her pals, and refusing me the dignity of responding, is just shoddy. One thing Craddock does seem to have picked up during her training at Mother Jones is the smug know-it-all attitude that I've always thought was the worst feature of the magazine's voice. This attitude is the true anti-politics that has cut Mother Jones off from real engagement, and fostered the irrelevancy she bemoans. It is cynical and destructive, a defense against doubt masked as superior wisdom. I hope it's not too late for her to learn a different, more professional style. -- Kerry Tremain Berkeley, Calif.
_______________SLAVES TO THE SYSTEM BY NINA SIEGAL (09/01/98)
	Nina Siegal documents incidents of women who are abused while in jail and indicts the whole corrections system for this. Why wasn't this a problem all the time men were being assaulted, raped, knifed and killed while in prison? This has never been a secret: Men are abused daily, and guards won't interfere. Society at large has known this, and few ever speak up. While the big push is to "let the young suffer the consequences of their action," any good criminal attorney will advise parents not to leave a teenage boy in jail for anything short of a major felony because the risks are too high. Most people think of a jail as a place where people are locked in little cages. This is far from the truth; prisoners are taken out for medical treatment, court dates, training, rehab services, working, etc. It is a jungle. Many people think that, since these are criminals, they get what they deserve. Really? Does a 16-year-old boy who was caught with liquor deserve to be raped? Does a 15-year-old who was shoplifting deserve to be knifed? The popular view seems to be that women are put in prison for something that isn't really their fault -- society made them do it. Women only need love and understanding to become better citizens. This thinking is what leads to women's prisons without lock-down facilities or proper emergency procedures. Women don't deserve this treatment, but men don't either. Why didn't Ms. Siegal protest when it was mostly men being abused, instead of letting the situation grow until it became acceptable to abuse any prisoners? -- John Chesman Monroe, Mich. SALON \| Sept. 9, 1998