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In Memoriam: Bruce R. Andrews, Fred G. Burke, Andre Gunder Frank, Ralph M. Goldman, Judy Emily Gruber, Fred Holborn, and Wallace Mendelson
Bruce R. Andrews, Robert Blaine Weaver Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Dickinson College, died at his home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on January 8, 2005, after a brief illness. Andrews received his Ph.D. in political science from Syracuse University and served on the faculty at Dickinson from 1960 until his retirement in 1992.
Teaching, scholarship, and politics and civic duty were great and intertwined passions in Bruce's life. He joined the U.S. Navy in the autumn of 1944 straight out of high school. Before he left for shipboard duty he glimpsed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the president's campaign motorcade passed through Bruce's native Trenton, New Jersey. He attended his first Democratic Party political convention in Chicago in 1952 as an Estes Kefauver supporter.
As a scholar, he was part of the post-war behavioral revolution in political science. Skeptical of the perceived wisdom about how government worked, Bruce used the tools of scientific data collection and analysis to investigate American electoral politics. He taught a wide range of courses including political behavior, public opinion and propaganda, and introduction to American politics. He also introduced the teaching of the media's role in politics at Dickinson. He was a popular and highly-regarded teacher. Students sought him out for his deep knowledge of the field of American politics, enthusiasm, and receptivity to different points of view. A believer in the value of hands-on experience, he regularly sent his students out into the community to conduct polls and political surveys.
Bruce was regarded as both a voice of reason and a pillar of liberalism on campus during the tumult of the 1960s and was elected an alternate Eugene McCarthy delegate to the 1968 convention in Chicago. He was also an ardent defender of academic freedom and the value of a liberal arts education. Bruce played an active role in the Democratic Party in Carlisle and regularly contributed his own polling skills and campaign expertise to local candidates.
For his achievements as a teacher and scholar, Bruce received Dickinson College's Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1992. In that same year, American University established a scholarship fund in his name in recognition of his years of support for its Washington Semester Program. In 2003, as a recipient of The John J. Curley '60 and Ann Conser Curley '63 Faculty Chair, he was honored as one of Dickinson's most distinguished and influential professors in the last 50 years.
Among his colleagues, students, many friends, and family, Bruce Andrews will be remembered for his abiding interest in politics, delight in political argument, and sweet disposition. As one friend summed up Bruce's character, he was a “gentleman and a gentle man.” He is survived by his wife of 47 years, Margery Andrews, and their three children: Stephen, Mary-Margaret, and Carolyn.
David Strand, Dickinson College
Fred G. Burke, professor emeritus of political science, died of a pulmonary embolism on March 10, 2005 in Newton, New Jersey, at the age of 79. He had a distinguished career as a political scientist and as a progressive-minded educational administrator.
Born in Collins, in western New York State, on January 1, 1926, Fred served in the Army Air Force in World War II and in the Korean War, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Williams College in 1953. He received his Masters and Doctorate from Princeton in 1955 and 1958, respectively. During his graduate studies Fred received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, and spent a year at Nuffield College in Oxford. He also received the J. Kimbrough Owen Award from the APSA.
In his first dozen years out of graduate school, Fred taught at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he directed the Arneson Institute of Practical Politics, Syracuse University, where he founded and directed the East African Studies program at the Maxwell School, and trained a whole cohort of future Africanists. He moved on to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was Dean of International Studies and University Professor. During those years he published widely on east African politics, traveling often to the region, consulting for the UN Economic Commission for Africa, and training Peace Corps volunteers. His books included Africa's Quest for Order (1964), Local Government and Politics in Uganda (1965), Tanganyika — Preplanning (1965), Sub-Saharan Africa (1966), and Africa (1970).
In 1970 Fred began his public career as Commissioner of Education for the state of Rhode Island. In that position he was instrumental in inaugurating full state funding of public schools and a statewide teachers' salary scale. In 1974 he became Commissioner of Education for New Jersey. His eight years in New Jersey were perhaps the highlight of his administrative career. Early in his tenure, he persuaded the legislature to enact “thorough and efficient” primary and secondary education, including assessment of students and evaluation of teachers and schools. In 1990, the state supreme court, in a case in which Fred was a defendant due to his official position when it was filed, ruled that New Jersey's system of funding schools was inequitable. In New Jersey, he had established a reputation, in the words of the New York Times, “for getting things done,” and for fighting for a high-quality education for all students.
In 1983, Fred came to the University of Connecticut as Vice President for Graduate Education and Research, Dean of the Graduate School, and Director of the Research Foundation. After several productive years in those capacities, he returned to full-time teaching until his retirement in 1992. During that time, he published his last book, Public Education: Who's in Charge (1991). While his time here was limited, Fred had a great impact on his students. On his passing, one former graduate student remarked, “More than an administrator and a public policy star, Burke was a teacher. Fred Burke made every student he conversed with feel like he or she was the most important person in the world, and that the dialogue was a dialogue of equals. Burke will be missed.” Another wrote, “It is hard to think of Burke as getting old: he always seemed so young to us; he has passed from this life much too soon.” After retiring from UConn, Fred became a senior fellow at the Phelps Stokes Fund.
Fred G. Burke leaves his wife, Carol Sterling, three sons and a daughter, two sisters, and four grandchildren.
Howard L. Reiter, University of Connecticut
April 23rd marked the passing of Andre Gunder Frank in Luxembourg, following a tumultuous 12-year battle with cancer. Frank was interested in phenomena, times, and places that most of the academy mistakenly believed we already understood well enough. His trenchant analyses often angered those who were anchored to the established wisdom, but never failed to enlighten open-minded readers. Frank's iconoclastic ways began early. His Ph.D. studies in economics at the University of Chicago were interrupted by work on the need for equity with efficiency at the University of Michigan. Returning to Chicago, Frank wrote his dissertation on the productivity of agriculture and industry in Ukraine under the Soviet system, helping to refine and establish the relationships between the concepts of total productivity, human capital, and economic growth. He concluded that Soviet model agriculture had failed, but also grew suspicious of emerging U.S. conceptualizations of modernization and development.
Frank left a teaching post at Michigan State and went to Latin America to study underdevelopment “from the inside.” In a few short years he produced an impressive array of critical works on “the development of underdevelopment,” including analyses of capital flows and foreign aid, national political and economic trajectories, global historical treatments, theoretical arguments (contra right and left), and considerations of various local programs and conditions. These works set the stage for the dependency perspective. Many of his students, like Theotonio dos Santos and Ruy Mauro Marini, refined these academic positions. Other friends and colleagues, including Fernando Henrique Cardoso, went on to play additional roles in the region as well.
In the 1970s and “go-go” 1980s, Frank, back in Europe, turned his attention to understanding the nature and dynamics of crisis. Downturns in the periphery were growing far worse, lending would lead to a debt crisis, export led growth had a repressive underbelly, and all of this would undercut what little progress might have been made during the period. At the same time, economic downturns in the West were becoming less responsive to monetary, fiscal, or exchange rate based stimulation. Frank also argued that a crisis was brewing in the socialist countries, and he wrote on this process, as well as its outcome, through the 1980s and into the early 1990s.
With the failure of “really existing socialism” in the East, and “really existing capitalism” in the South and perhaps elsewhere, Frank began to re-think the utility of all social theories of development. This time Frank did not attack just one or two sacred cows, but the entire herd. Social theory from Marx and Weber through Wallerstein, and including early Gunder Frank, were reassessed. With Barry Gills and others, Frank took aim at Eurocentric analysis and “modern” history born of a belief in various “transitions.” He began to re-think the concepts, chronologies and categorizations that animated much of later 19th-, 20th-, and early 21st-century historiography and social theory. Several edited volumes, and the paradigmatic ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, were the result. Frank was working at his usual frenetic pace on several projects, including the 19th-century sequel to ReOrient, when he passed away.
Gunder Frank's life, like his academic work, was marked by movement. Born Andreas Frank in Berlin in 1929, his family moved in 1933 to escape the political and racial climate of Adolf Hitler's Germany. After living in various places in Europe, Frank came to the United States, lived in Hollywood, attended high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan (where he picked up the nickname “Gunder”), and graduated from Swarthmore College. His graduate education was interrupted by travel and study across the U.S., including working a series of odd jobs and ending up at the Vesuvius Café in San Francisco, California, just ahead of Jack Kerouac. His 10 years in Latin America included teaching and working in Brazil, Mexico, and Chile, his marriage to Marta Fuentes, and the birth of sons Paul and Miguel. He was forced to flee for his life from Chile during the bloody 1973 coup, returning to Germany some 40 years after first leaving, again as an exile. His belief that the process of escaping underdevelopment would not be a peaceful one made him persona non grata in the U.S. for many years, and after leaving Latin America he taught in Germany, where the government never allowed him a permanent position, Paris, East Anglia, and finally Amsterdam, where he spent many years. Along the way he held visiting positions in Boston, China, Minnesota, Montreal, Newcastle, and New York. With Marta's death in 1993, and mandatory retirement, he worked in Toronto, at Florida International University, Miami, Nebraska, and Northeastern. Gunder and his wife Alison Candela finally moved back to Europe, where he lived in Luxembourg and lectured in Italy.
Frank's CV includes over 40 books and 1,000 articles and chapters in economics, anthropology, sociology, politics, and history. Translations are available in some 25 languages. Gunder was a tireless scholar who maintained a grueling pace of study and travel. He was intellectually aggressive, could be very difficult at times, but was unfailingly honest and direct. Always learning, he constantly sought out the widest array of scholars with insights into a variety of questions, nurtured younger colleagues, and was never afraid to change his position when the evidence warranted. Within 10 days of his death his family had received some 3,000 messages of condolence from around the world. Gunder will be sorely missed.
Robert A. Denemark, University of Delaware
Ralph M. Goldman, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at San Francisco State University, died Sunday, July 10th in his home at age 85. Specializing in American and transnational political parties, Goldman championed the use of parties as the institutional alternative to civil and international war. In addition, he saw competitive transnational parties as crucial to overcoming terrorist and anti-democratic movements.
A significant portion of his professional life was spent as professor of political science at San Francisco State University (1962–1986), where he also served as dean of faculty research and director of the Institute for Research on International Behavior. From 1956–1962 he taught at Michigan State University and for the three years prior to that was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Post-retirement, he served for four years as director of off-campus graduate programs in politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
Goldman published more than a dozen books and over 80 articles in scholarly journals and encyclopedias. While he viewed himself as an interdisciplinary behavioral scientist, he concentrated his research and publications on party systems and conflict management. His professional publications began with his 1960 co-authorship of the ground-breaking Brookings Institution study The Politics of National Party Conventions. In From Warfare to Party Politics (1990), he shows how nations evolve from violence to party competition via a “critical transition” in their political development. Acknowledging that war may be necessary (see Building Trust: An Introduction to Peacekeeping and Arms Control, 1997), Goldman viewed war as a last resort. To popularize his argument that party systems can be the alternative to war, he wrote his first novel, The Mentor and the Protégé (Xlibris Publishing Co., 2003), available in English and Spanish, in which he describes how, during the Mexican Revolution, Presidents Calles and Cardenas produced a viable party system and an end to the Mexican civil war. In his most recent work, From DNA to Culture: The Synthesis Principle in Human Development (Xlibris Publishing Co., 2003), Goldman demonstrates how the social sciences contribute to an understanding of evolution. His journal articles and citations to most of his books may be found in a four-volume collection, The Future Catches Up (iUniverse Publishers, 2002). The full extent of his professional work is described in Who's Who in America.
Goldman was born in Brooklyn, NY on May 14, 1920, to immigrant parents. His father was a pharmacist and his mother a garment worker. He became politically active while attending Boys High School where he edited the school newspaper, organized the peace club, and led the honor society. He left Brooklyn College to join an uncle's publishing company in Puerto Rico and Venezuela. He returned to the U.S. and served for four years in the Adjutant Generals Corps during World War II, where he rose to the rank of Captain. He then completed his undergraduate education at New York University and earned his M.A and Ph.D. in political science at the University of Chicago.
Goldman is survived by his wife, Barbara Elizabeth Alban, two adult children, Peter and Meg, and his brother, Leonard. Meg, her husband Gary Prince, and two grandchildren, Laurel and Austin, reside in Washington. Leonard and his wife Elinor live in New Jersey.
Barbara Elizabeth Alban
Judith Emily Gruber, a member of the department of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, died on June 1, 2005 at age 54, after a 20-month battle against the form of brain cancer known as glioblastoma multiforme. Her family, friends, colleagues, and students are devastated by the loss, but we remain awed and inspired by her marvelous life and gutsy refusal to yield to the awful disease. She was the fastest-thinking, most incisive, fastest-talking person that any of us knew, and she retained those features until almost the end.
Judy Gruber was born in Manhattan in 1950. She received her A.B. from Cornell University in 1971, magna cum laude and with distinction, and her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1981, also with distinction. There she met her future husband, Joseph Houska, who also holds a Ph.D. from the department of political science. Judy received the Leonard D. White award for the best dissertation in the field of public administration; one of my favorite memories is her insistence on buying a flowered silk dress in which to walk across the stage, in order to make it clear that one can be a successful scholar and feminine. That was a statement in 1982, and one that guided much of her life in the following years.
Judy was a lecturer in the Yale political science department for several years, and joined the faculty of U.C. Berkeley in 1979, where she received tenure in 1986. She published Controlling Bureaucracies: Dilemmas in Democratic Governance with University of California Press in 1987. That book analyzed democratic control of public administrators by “provid[ing] a structure for understanding the democratic values implicit in different means of exercising control and for evaluating the costs and benefits” of using those means (p. 27). Judy explored the classic normative and empirical problems of representative democracy—how can elected officials control better-informed bureaucrats, how can citizens control both, and how can bureaucrats accomplish their jobs if they must constantly worry about ill-informed controllers? Interviews with officials in education, fire control, and housing provided illuminating evidence of how public officials believe in, but often resist, external authority or management. The analytic logic combined with the earthy interviews to produce a set of suggestions (knowing Judy, they were closer to instructions!) to citizens about how to use resources at their disposal to induce bureaucrats to follow the public interest rather than their own, instead of trying to bludgeon them into compliance. Judy loved interviewing her bureaucrats; she would come back to our cubicle after a long day full of ideas and anecdotes, and her only “regret” in writing Controlling Bureaucracies was “that insurance regulations prevented me from learning how to slide down a fire pole” (p. ix).
The book was well received. As Michael Johnston wrote in the APSR review, the book was “well argued and … rigorous at the theoretical level while remaining sensitive to the variations” of the real world. It “avoided the aridity which characterizes too many discussions of bureaucracy,” and showed that “politics still matters, and therein lie opportunities to reconcile bureaucracy with democratic control.” Dale Rogers Marshall was even more direct in her comments on the back: “this is the most sophisticated and systematic work on the subject … succinct, direct, and even graceful.”
“Succinct, direct, graceful, and sophisticated” pretty well characterized Judy's other written work. She followed Controlling Bureaucracies with articles, chapters, reports, monographs, and conference presentations—often co-authored with Janet Weiss or Judith Innes—still investigating how the public can control the officials working in their name without constraining those officials to the point where they cannot do their job. She and Weiss studied the relationship between information and public policy, seeking to understand how various agencies and levels of government collect information, use it for their work, and employ it strategically to control others or avoid control. More recently, Judy's scholarly interests turned to the problems of regional governance of transportation and resource management in the absence of any structure of hierarchy. Those are clearly issues of intense concern to her beloved Berkeley, but they also resonate across the United States and in nations throughout the world. Characteristically, she and Innes analyzed “the emergence of … consensus building institutions that bring together the diverse players in a policy arena in order to bring about coordinated action” even in a context of “acute fragmentation.” The key, they argued, was to use collaborative efforts to develop social, political, and intellectual capital—easy to say but hard to do, and an array of policy-makers have found this work helpful in moving from aspiration to genuine regional coordination.
Judy's research and publications were important, but she chose to make her greatest professional contributions through teaching and community-building in the U.C. system. Here she was legendary. She created, and then co-chaired, the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Dependent Care at Berkeley for six years, chaired the Academic Senate Committee on University Welfare, and was the vice-chair of the system-wide Committee on Faculty Welfare. What those stodgy titles indicate is that Judy revolutionized at Berkeley the always vexed relationship between family and work life. With her leadership, Berkeley set up child-care centers on campus, created a policy to give parental leave to all faculty, and established a counseling program for those with sick partners or parents. With others, she published a massive compendium of research on women and gender, as well as the award-winning “Guide for Balancing Work and Family.” And she did more—on affirmative action, benefit and personnel issues, health education, and library acquisitions. Over the past year, I and others have rediscovered (once more!) the difficulties that research universities face in enabling women students and faculty to succeed; as a consequence of Judy's organizational genius, Harvard, like many schools, is looking to Berkeley for models.
Berkeley recognized Judy's value, and rewarded her with the first Faculty Distinguished Service Award. She also received the university's highest honor, the Berkeley Citation, both in 2003. She very effectively chaired the political science department from 2001 until fall 2003, when her illness was discovered—and I can attest to her success in luring away excellent faculty and graduate students from other departments that tried strenuously to attract and keep them.
Judy's students were at the core of her deepest professional concerns—perhaps because with them she could partly combine her commitments as a woman, a mother, a professional, and a scholar. She taught the introductory American politics course for years, partly because someone had to but also because she loved introducing teenagers to the world of politics and governance. She continued teaching her dissertation seminar in the months after her diagnosis, even when she had to ask Joe or me for help as her reading ability declined. Typically, one of our last conversations involved a former student's new job.
And Judy's students returned her regard. On learning of her death, they wrote the following:
If only any of us could be another Judy Gruber. Even as her cancer worsened, Judy's commitment to her family and loved ones remained firm. She took pride in watching her older son David begin his studies at Stanford, and one of her final goals was achieved when she saw her younger son Aaron star in his school's production of “Cabaret.” Each of us has cherished memories; I will not forget our debates about politics, our off-the-record exchanges about colleagues and prospective hires, her strictures about how I should treat my husband and raise my children, her devotion to her family, and her wicked sense of humor. Yet another former graduate student speaks for Judy's family, colleagues, friends, students, and many beneficiaries when she says, “I am going to miss her very, very much.”
Jennifer Hochschild, Harvard University
Frederick Holborn, 76, a senior adjunct professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, died June 3 at his home in the District of Columbia of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Without being too cute about it, I had grown to think he was almost immortal—he had become such an intrinsic part of the Congressional Fellowship that I've been honored to direct for the last seven years, and his mannerisms seemed so immutable, that I never entertained the thought that someday he might not be there. It was probably belated, but surely fitting, that he was awarded the school's Founder's Award at the May 26 graduation.
My first encounter with Fred was as a Foreign Service Officer in the APSA Congressional Fellowship Program's “Foreign Affairs Seminar,” which he chaired from his faculty position at Johns Hopkins SAIS for more than three decades. For the next two months he lived up to the Washington Post title of his June 9th obituary—“Foreign Policy Guru.” Although the focus of the seminar was then, as it continues to be, the legislative role of Congress in foreign policy formulation, Fred also emerged as a congressional and Congressional Fellow guru. In discussions about possible assignments on the Hill, Fred provided flesh to bone well beyond such authoritative sources as Congressional Quarterly's Politics in America or the National Journal's Almanac of American Politics. He could not only provide information on the policy perspectives of a senator or representative, he could enlighten you about their personality and give you a sense of what the bio-rhythm of the office would be like as a workplace. And, as a bulwark of the Fellowship, he kept track of every student from the seminar and frequently corrected mistakes in our own computer data base.
He did not come to this expertise by happenstance. He was the quintessential blend of scholarship and applied politics. However, any tribute to Fred Holborn must include some of the biographic data in Joe Holley's Washington Post obituary that, as a very private person, Fred was loathe to relate in large quantities. Fred was born in Heidelberg, Germany where he spent his early youth with his sister Hannah Holborn Gray, who later became President of the University of Chicago and one of the U.S's preeminent intellectuals. Their father, Hajo Holborn, was a renowned professor at the Institute of Politics in Berlin, and their mother, Annemarie Bettman, held a doctorate in classical philology. When Dr. Holborn's research on the Weimer Republic came to the attention of the Nazis, he was dismissed from the institute, and in 1934, the Holborn family was forced to flee the country. After a year in England, Fred's father became a professor in Yale's department of history, where he taught for 35 years.
After coming to the U.S., Fred grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, attended the Taft School, and graduated from Harvard in 1949. He was a management intern for a year with the Department of the Interior and the Displaced Persons Commission in Washington, D.C. From 1953 to 1957, he was a fellow of the Littauer Center at Harvard, where he received his Master's degree in public administration. During much of that same period (1954 to 1959), Fred was a teaching fellow in Harvard's department of government and an instructor in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the next decade (1959 to 1971), Fred began the applied side of his experience. He served as a legislative assistant to Senator John F. Kennedy from 1959 to 1961 and moved with the newly-elected President Kennedy as a White House special assistant from 1961 to 1966. In the White House, he drafted letters, wrote speeches, and handled White House communication with the foreign press. He was also detailed for two years in the Office of Attorney General and the Department of State. He spent a year on the staff of the President Johnson's Task Force on Telecommunications Policy and also associated with the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research where he studied the changing role of White House staffs since World War II, focusing on foreign policy.
In 1971, Fred joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he became famous for having initiated the school's well-known crisis simulation exercise which he directed until his death. Probably equally well remembered was his hosting of the school's biennial election night party, as a SAIS student recounted in Holley's obituary, with its $2.00 Rolling Rock beers, cold pizza, live CNN coverage on multiple television screens, and the school's own in-house political analyst—the professor himself. There was no network anchor or political pundit who could compete with Fred's almost encyclopedic knowledge of domestic politics, the key players, and the multitude of electoral variables. And, these insights were only part of the package he would bring to the two-decade old APSA Congressional Fellowship Program beginning in 1972.
On the basis of sustained engagement, few things could challenge Fred Holborn's contributions to the Fellowship. A major innovation at that time was the “Foreign Affairs Seminar,” which was introduced in 1972 and has continued to the present. As recounted by Fred, the one and only coordinator of the seminar until his retirement after three decades in 2002, the idea was born over a lunch between Francis Wilcox, then the SAIS Dean, and progressive Republican Representative Brad Morse of Massachusetts. Both men had an abiding interest in foreign affairs and the Congressional Fellowship Program which, prior to the State Department Pearson Program [named after Republican Senator James Pearson of Kansas] or Brookings “Legis” fellows, was the only vehicle then introducing Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) to the Hill. Wilcox had been a former chief of staff for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and went on to become Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. Morse, after leaving Congress, went on to become president of the Salzburg Seminar. Both men felt FSOs needed both a better “political touch” and firmer grounding in the legislative role in foreign policy formulation. Wilcox and Morse approached the APSA and forged an agreement for the creation of a two-month seminar at SAIS geared to entering Congressional Fellows from the broader foreign affairs community. Fred was the clear consensus choice to direct the seminar, which subsequently began in September 1972 with eight Fellows (five from the Department of State, one from the United States Information Agency, and two from the Central Intelligence Agency).
These were strong Fellows who moved on to strong careers; in just about any year, there would be a dozen-or-so sitting ambassadors who were former Congressional Fellows. From the beginning, there were two audiences for the seminar: the foreign affairs Congressional Fellows and a handful of SAIS graduate students. Over the years, the fellowship began to attract highly competitive military fellows from the Department of Defense and, in 2001, gained its first international fellows when the program's first senior Fulbright scholars, from Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden, joined the class. Those Fulbright Fellows have been followed by participants from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the People's Republic of China, the Czech Republic, Egypt, India, Mexico, the Philippines, and Poland, and next year by Fellows from Jordan, Morocco, and a second Fellow each from Chile and China. After 30 years at the helm, Fred Holborn retired. He was succeeded by Charles Stevenson, a Harvard Ph.D., veteran of some 20 years working on Senate national security and foreign affairs issues, and a member of the National War College faculty.
Over those same three decades, Fred regularly lectured at the three-week orientation program with a special emphasis on what he cataloged as his pros-and-cons of various congressional offices as offering a good learning experience for the Fellows. He also chaired the outside selection panel which interviewed candidates to become Federal Fellows.
Shortly after my 1997 return to the APSA to direct the program which had initially taken me to the Hill as a 1984–85 Fellow, I concluded that Fred Holborn did not seem to have changed since those earlier years—he still had a somewhat gruff visage, could produce a variety of guttural sounds which defied translation (but certainly added emphasis), unfailingly provided insights available nowhere else, and gave enormously of himself to each Fellow. For me, he served as a conscience of the Fellowship—a reminder of the high standards which, over more than 50 years, have built a reputation without rival on Capitol Hill.
It is not surprising that Fred became the sixth Honorary Congressional Fellow in 2002, joining such deans of the program as legendary aide and confidant to Speaker Sam Rayburn, D. B. Hardeman; former Secretary of State Dean Acheson; former Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey; former Representative Lee Hamilton, now president of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars and host to some 30 Fellows during his congressional tenure; and Fellowship Advisory Committee member, Washington Post columnist, and dean of the Washington press corps, David Broder.
I am honored to write this in memoriam on behalf of the more than 2,000 Congressional Fellowship alumni, nearly all of whom would remember Fred with the same affection, respect, and almost awe that I do. His has become an inextricable part of the Fellowship legacy and of Congress—its history, its inner workings, its personalities. As with current stellar athletes, Fred's jersey will forever hang from the Fellowship's rafters.
Jeffrey R. Biggs, APSA Congressional Fellowship Program
On November 19, 2004, political science lost one of its most eminent scholars. Active throughout the second half of the 20th century, Wallace Mendelson's long and distinguished career stands as a model for all those who would aspire to excellence in any academic discipline. All of the great scholarly virtues are there: unswerving devotion to truth, good detective work, meticulous care in the employment and attribution of sources, clear and economical writing, catchy titles (“The Untroubled World of Jurimetrics”), pithy opening sentences (“There are fashions in politics, just like in hemlines”). All these and more became telltale signs of Mendelson's work.
The area of political science in which Mendelson chose to employ his scholarly talents was that of public law. In this field, Wallace came to be identified primarily with two major ideas: the concept of judicial restraint and the historical study of legal and constitutional development. Reflecting his earlier legal training at Harvard Law School under the tutelage of Roscoe Pound, Thomas Reed Powell, and Felix Frankfurter, Mendelson argued more forcefully than any political scientist of his time against the increasing judicial activism of the 1950s and 1960s. Against the tide of academic opinion, Mendelson charged that federal judges (especially Supreme Court justices) were aggressively extending the power of judicial review in order to defeat legislative policy outcomes disliked by the judges—policies that were nonetheless supported by majority rule and authorized by the Constitution. According to Mendelson, the only way to preserve democratic government under law and avoid the alternative of government by men is for judges to respect the historically anchored meanings of constitutional words and phrases, resisting the temptation to regard such phrases as infinitely malleable or manipulable in accordance with changing beliefs.
Standing virtually alone among colleagues of his generation, Wallace Mendelson also came to be known as the leading opponent of the neo-behavioralist approach to the study of judicial decisions. In the terms of today's discourse in the political science/public law community, Mendelson was a staunch defender of the “legal model” of judicial decision making, and a correspondingly staunch critic of the “attitudinal model.” According to Mendelson, one cannot understand a court's decision by measuring the “attitudes” of the judges on an oversimplified left-right continuum and then counting their votes to see if they match up to a preconceived “liberal” or “conservative” notion. If one really wants to understand a judicial decision, one must look at the law in its full historical development. One must carefully study previous judicial decisions or precedents, relevant statutes, constitutional provisions and their historical interpretation. Wallace had a deep and abiding faith that, in the last analysis, the law (our constitutional law not excepted) was—and will remain—a reasonably coherent whole, notwithstanding the short-run efforts of a politically-minded judicial elite to turn the Constitution into a blueprint for judicially-inspired social engineering.
So far as I can tell, Professor Mendelson did not expend much energy exploring the connection between judicial activism and neo-behavioralism, yet it is hard to believe that he did not regard them as closely related. Judicial activism and neo-behavioralism may certainly be viewed as two sides of the same coin. Proponents of attitudinalism never tire of claiming that the primary motivator of a judge's decision is a more-or-less raw policy preference based upon “attitudes” that arise from psycho-social behavioral “determinants” that bear little or no relation to legal or constitutional rationality. According to the neo-behavioralists, the most that can be expected from judicial decision makers is an effort to rationalize holdings post hoc after the decision has been reached on other grounds. In an important sense, neo-behavioralists must—if they are consistent—claim that all judges are activists, since judicial activism is nothing more nor less than deciding cases outside the bounds of legal and constitutional rationality. Viewed in this way, neo-behavioralism is the methodological apology for activist judging; and activist judging is, in turn, the pavement on the road to judicial supremacy.
At bottom, Mendelson did not believe that the law was essentially political. With John Marshall and William Blackstone, he held that law and politics were two very different kinds of things. Politics is society's response to the immediate and the pressing. Law is the accumulated wisdom of the ages. This wisdom is distilled through the filter of centuries of legal and constitutional experience, and is not to be sported away in an emotional frenzy by a handful of judges responding to the perceived “needs of the moment.” Mendelson knew that short-term interests frequently betray long-term interests, and he had no doubt as to which set of interests should be embodied in law.
It might seem that Mendelson lost these battles. After all, both neo-behavioralism and judicial activism seem to be alive and well. But as Plato taught, appearance and reality are two very different things. A sober second thought might suggest that the jury is still out. The last two decades have witnessed a strong revival of interest in legal and constitutional history. Notably, the history of the revolutionary and founding eras have received much recent attention, along with the roots of Anglo-American constitutionalism in English common law and early modern political thought. Wallace Mendelson played a key role in the effort to keep these interests alive during previous decades in which they were largely dormant among professional political scientists. At the same time, a conservative Supreme Court has once again brought judicial activism under intense criticism. Wallace often predicted that this would happen whenever the results of judicial policy making ceased being acceptable to opinion leaders in the academic establishment.
In addition to his contributions to political science and to constitutional scholarship, Wallace Mendelson was a great teacher. He expected and received the best that a student could give. My own experience with Professor Mendelson's tutelage was as a doctoral student in the early 1980s, and my first experience with him tells much about the man. It was my first class with him, the “Famous American Judges” course he developed in the 1970s. While explaining the beliefs that led judges in the late nineteenth century to adopt a hostile approach to economic regulation, Mendelson quoted a short passage from one of Andrew Carnegie's writings to make the point. The unbridled (and—so it seemed to me at the time—hopelessly utopian) optimism of the passage in question caused me to give forth an audible, cynical chuckle, at which point Wallace's eyes filled with tears, and he said to me something like this: “Young man, this passage may seem silly and trite to you now, but Carnegie meant exactly what he said in it; and had he not dedicated half his fortune to building the libraries that were to bring about this silly utopian fantasy, I wouldn't be sitting here now lecturing you about how you need to cultivate a better sense of history!” After that embarrassment, as I was trying to leave class unobtrusively, Wallace quietly approached and asked if I would be willing to sharpen my sense of history by doing some work on the contract clause. In this encounter, Wallace demonstrated to me that he was as devoted to his students as he was to his subject.
From this and hundreds of subsequent encounters that I have had with Wallace Mendelson over the past quarter-century, two features of his teaching stand out most prominently in my mind. First, his sense of history was the sharpest of anyone I have ever known. He taught that everything worth knowing about human beings, human behavior, and the law must be known in full historical context because the human being is, above all, the “historical animal,” and the law is preeminently the “historical subject.” Second, he was truly a great democrat (with a lower case “d”), with an abiding faith in the long run ability of the people to govern themselves. He never tired of repeating the maxim that no man was really fit to govern another. In the last analysis, this means that we have no choice but to govern ourselves collectively through the legislative process, no matter how badly we do it in particular instances. We cannot turn over to the courts or any other unelected, unresponsive agency of government our duty to decide contentious and painful political issues. Any and all efforts to substitute the will of judges or bureaucrats for the will of the people—whether in the name of freedom, equality, or rights—are elitist through-and-through, and will ultimately undermine the very values they claim to support.
Both these facets of Professor Mendelson's teaching exemplify the most striking characteristic of the man, the virtue that made him the truest of scholars and a perfect gentleman as well. This virtue is humility. In an era in which enlarged egos are the order of the day in academia, Wallace was a model of humility—though he had more reason than most to have an inflated ego. I was continually struck with the fact that, on my many visits with him in his later years, he always worried that he was taking up too much of my time. He never left me feeling that I had taken up too much of his. This self-effacing attitude was fully apparent in his personal and professional life. Though a very private man—and professionally a courageous and rugged individualist too—he nevertheless regarded the scholarly enterprise as an intensely public and cooperative one. Though himself a formidable writer (and poet), he did not believe that scholars, any more than judges, were creative artists whose benchmark was novelty.
As a constitutional historian, Wallace believed that there were questions aplenty to be answered within the established tradition of his academic discipline, and he expected both himself and his students to occupy themselves answering them—not reinventing the field. He spent his life collecting such questions in a long list that he kept in a desk drawer. Perhaps knowing that he would never be able to answer them all, whenever a promising student came around looking for a project, he suggested one from this list. As a democrat, Wallace never believed that he or anyone else—certainly not some self-appointed intellectual elite with contempt for history and contempt for the people—could govern the people better than they could govern themselves.
Wallace did not fancy himself a philosopher, but I cannot resist closing this memorial with the observation that he lived one of the great philosophies more completely than anyone I have ever known. He was, in both his life and his work, a thoroughgoing Aristotelian. Moderate in all things, his life was an embodiment of prudence, or practical wisdom. He had the finest sense of his own limitations and those of others. One of his favorite mottos was never to waste time worrying about things one can do nothing about. Aristotle held that happiness is an ethical state, an activity expressing the highest degree of intellectual and moral virtue. If Aristotle was correct in this, as I think he was, then Wallace Mendelson's life was truly a happy one. We who mourn the passing of this great man may take our comfort in that knowledge.
Robert Lowry Clinton, Southern Illinois University Carbondale