LOS ANGELES TIMES 1985 BOOK PRIZE NOMINEES

The sixth annual Los Angeles Times Book Prize program takes place this year on Nov. 1. Today we publish excerpts from the five books nominated for the history prize.

ALLAN M. BRANDT, No Magic Bullet, A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (Oxford University: $19.95).

“Since the late 19th Century,” Allan M. Brandt writes, “venereal disease . . . has typically been cited as a sign of deep-seated sexual disorder, a literalization of what was perceived to be a decaying social order.” The “social construction” of the sexually transmitted diseases reached a turning point at the end of World War I: French toleration of prostitution immediately raised doubts for many Americans concerning the moral rectitude of the nation the doughboys were sent to save. For American reformers the system of regulated prostitution symbolized the debasement of French society. As Charles Eliot, the former president of Harvard University, wrote:

“The failure of the French government to protect their soldiers from these evils is the gravest error that government has committed; for those vices have proved more destructive to the French people since August, 1914, than all the German artillery rifles, hand grenades, poisonous gases and fire blasts. The killed transmit no poison to their families and descendants--the victims of alcohol and prostitution do. . . .”

The caption on a poster expressed the same theme more bluntly: “A German Bullet Is Cleaner Than a Whore.”

For many Americans, the sorry record of the Allies in combatting venereal disease confirmed the image of continental debauchery. In previous wars, the American military might have regretfully accepted such casualties, but the combination of the moral stridency of Progressivism and the new consciousness of order and efficiency made losses to venereal disease intolerable. These demands explain the significance of the American battle against sexually transmitted diseases that the war unleashed.

KEVIN STARR, Inventing the Dream, California Through the Progressive Era (Oxford University: $19.95).

Kevin Starr’s still unfinished history of California began with “Americans and the California Dream.” In this second volume of that history he directs the larger part of his attention to Southern California, for reasons that he sets out in his preface: How hauntingly beautiful, how replete with lost possibilities, seems that Southern California of two and three generations ago, now that a dramatically different society has emerged in its place. What possible connections, one can legitimately ask, can there be between that lost world, with its arroyo cabins and Spanish imagery, its daydreams of Malibu sunsets and orange groves, and today’s mega-suburbia extending from Mexico to Kern County? This is a good question, and it cannot be answered by mere pieties regarding the usable past, for few American regions have experienced accelerations and quantum leaps comparable to those experienced by Southern California in the years that follow the period of this narrative. That older Southern California, however--that Southern California dream, if you will--is, I believe, primarily of value in and of itself as a past creation of American society as it found itself on the Pacific Coast south of the Tehachapi Mountains in the decades before and after 1900. Here flourished for 50 years or so a unique interaction of Protestant high-mindedness (frequently clothing itself in Latin Catholic imagery), the genteel tradition, the booster spirit, conformity, eccentricity and rebellion, Progressive reform, naturalism, and agrarian myth, all at work, primarily, among the American middle classes as they settled into a unique semi-arid landscape fronting a spectacular seashore and graced by perhaps the finest weather on the planet. From this rich, often eccentric mixture of orthodoxy and innovation emerged a regional society that in its future developments and transformations would set national standards of American identity, as the attitudes and style of Southern California were exported via the film industry to the rest of the nation. In an elusive but compelling manner, Southern California was destined to secure for itself a fixed place in the collective daydream of America.

JAMES FARMER, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (Arbor House: $16.95).

Born a “PK” (preacher’s kid) in Mississippi, James Farmer headed CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) during the epoch-making “Freedom Rides” of 1961. The success of the rides made him a national figure and led, eventually, to a position in the Nixon Administration. Here, Farmer recalls a meeting with Lyndon B. Johnson:

As vice president, (Johnson) was chairman of the President’s Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity. It was that capacity of his that led me to request a meeting.

Statistics showed that the median average income of blacks was stalled at less than 60% of whites. Worse, the gap was widening. I was convinced that the simple color blindness of anti-discrimination codes had taken us about as far as it could. . . . Something more advanced was now needed.

Johnson spoke: “What d’you suggest? What could be more advanced than anti-discrimination?”

I continued: “What I am suggesting is that we no longer tell employers to be oblivious to the color of applicants, but to look at their color to see if the minority applicants are too few or nonexistent. They should then consider the possibility that they are not advertising in and recruiting from the right places. I’m proposing further that if two applicants are equally qualified, the fact that there are too few minority persons employed there they should weigh in favor of the minority applicant. In a word, what I’m proposing is a policy of ‘compensatory preferential treatment’ similar to that used with veterans.”

Johnson considered what I had said for several seconds and reacted with enthusiasm. “I think you’re right. I agree with you. We have to give minorities an extra push to help them catch up. It’s not fair to ask a man to run a race when the other fellow is halfway around the track. But don’t call it compensatory--what was that?”

I repeated the phrase.

“Oh, what a terrible name. We can’t call it that. Let’s see, what can we call it? We have to move the nation forward, act positively, affirmatively. That’s it: affirmative action.”

EVAN S. CONNELL, Son of the Morning Star (North Point: $20).

Evan S. Connell provides the fullest possible context for his history of Custer and the battle of the Little Big Horn. A part of that context is the attitude of the man some Indians called Son of the Morning Star toward those whom he was sent to fight and whom he so notoriously failed to defeat: As a West Point cadet in 1858 he wrote a boring, prophetic, ingenuous little essay sentimentally titled “The Red Man” in which he laments the imminent destruction of the red man’s home of peace and plenty. He speaks of the Indian’s “dauntless brow” and “manly limbs,” and regrets that already these red men have been scattered “by the fury of the tempest.”

After some rough experience, however, he did not write sentimentally about Indians and he was annoyed by those who did. He felt sorry Cooper’s Indians were not real Indians, but they were not. That was all there was to it.

“Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelope him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet with him, in his native village, on the war path, and when raiding upon our frontier settlements and lines of travel, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the “ noble red man.” We see him as he is, and, so far as all knowledge goes, as he ever has been, a savage in every sense of the word; not worse, perhaps, than his white brother would be similarly born and bred, but one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds that of any wild beast of the desert. . . .”

This absolute, irrefutable conviction--that he was leading a regiment of civilized humans against bestial enemies--should explain the rigidity of Custer’s command. If his unit was to survive it must above all else be disciplined, which of course is true.

OCTAVIO PAZ, One Earth, Four or Five Worlds, Reflections on Contemporary History (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $14.95).

Poet and Mexican diplomat, Paz divides this collection of his historical essays in half. The first half deals with the world as made outside Latin America. The second half deals with the world Latin America has made. In both halves, Paz is intensely aware of how what follows must build on what has preceded, and of what happens when men try to build otherwise: From their very beginning, the religious communities of New England jealously declared their autonomy with respect to the State. Inspired by the example of the Christian churches of the first centuries, these groups were always hostile to the authoritarian and bureaucratic tradition of the Catholic Church. Since Constantine, Christianity had lived in symbiosis with political power; for more than a thousand years the Church had followed the imperial-bureaucratic model of Rome and Byzantium. The Reformation marked the rupture of this tradition, a rupture that the religious communities of New England, in their turn, carried to its limits, emphasizing the egalitarian features and the tendency toward self-government of the Protestant groups of the Low Countries.

In New Spain the Church was first and foremost a hierarchy and an administration--that is, a bureaucracy of clerics that in certain respects is reminiscent of the institution of the mandarins of the old Chinese Empire. Hence the admiration of the Jesuits when, in the eighteenth century, they were confronted with the regime of K’ang-hsi, in which they at last saw the concrete realization of their idea of what a hierarchical and harmonious society could be--a society that was stable but not static, like a watch that keeps perfect time and doesn’t run down. In the English colonies the Church was not a hierarchy of clerics who were the exclusive repositories of knowledge, but the free community of the faithful. The Church was plural and from the beginning it was made up of a network of associations of believers, a true prefiguration of the political society of democracy.

The religious basis of American democracy is not visible today, but it is not any less powerful in consequence. More than a foundation, it is a buried taproot; the day it dries up, so will that country.