Social Contract Loses Two Good Friends - From Publisher

By John Tanton
Volume 12, Number 3 (Spring 2002)
Issue theme: "Media coverage on immigration - where's the balance?"

Hugh Davis Graham, a member of the advisory board of The Social Contract since its inception twelve years ago and a frequent participant in the annual Social Contract Press Writers Workshops, died of cancer at Santa Barbara, California on March 26, 2002. He was 65.

An outstanding scholar of American history, Hugh's newest book, Collision Course The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America, has just been released by Oxford University Press. Most recently he was involved in organizing a conference of scholars on the Reagan presidency at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He also was active with other historians in pursuing a law suit against the Bush administration which has curtailed access to previous presidential and vice-presidential papers.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Dr. Graham graduated magna cum laud from Yale in 1958. He served two years as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps artillery. His Ph.D. in history was earned at Stanford in 1964. Teaching positions followed at Stanford, Bay Area, Foothill College, and San Jose State. He took leave to act as a training officer with the Peace Corps and later went to Washington to become the Peace Corp's public affairs western director.

Hugh moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1967, to be assistant director of the Institute of Southern History at the Johns Hopkins University and to teach there, and later joined the faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he also served as Dean of Social Sciences and the Graduate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research. In 1991, he accepted the Holland M. McTyeire Chair at the history department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He was chair of the department from 1994 to 1996. Hugh was a gifted lecturer and caring teacher as evidenced by the numerous teaching awards he received from Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt.

In addition to teaching and working in university administration, Hugh was a formidable scholar. In all he wrote eight books, including The Civil Rights Era (1990), which was nominated by the Oxford University Press for the Pulitzer Prize in 1991, Civil Rights and the Presidency (1992), and The Uncertain Triumph. He edited seven scholarly books, wrote chapters for many anthologies, and published regularly in history and political science journals.

A consummate southern gentleman, Hugh will be sorely missed by his many friends in the immigration reform movement where his calm reasonableness, irresistible logic, and scholarly contributions endeared him to all.

Another familiar figure among contributors to The Social Contract, and to the movement to bring together concerns about the environment, population growth, and the levels of immigration, was Professor Edward Levy of New York City. He died of complications from pancreatic cancer on April 2 at the age of 72.

Like many others, Ed came into the immigration reform movement from a strong background in environmental activism. A composer and professor of music at Yeshiva University in Manhattan, Ed was a member of the board of directors of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and founder of the Tri-State Immigration Moratorium, Inc. (TRIM), a New York reform group advocating lower levels of legal immigration and stricter controls on illegal immigration. Ed was always a welcome addition to the discussions at each year's Writers Workshop sponsored by The Social Contract Press.

Dr. Levy was born in Brooklyn in 1929 and graduated from City College in 1957. He received his M.F.A. in music composition from Princeton in 1960 and his Doctor of Education from Columbia University Teachers College in 1967 at which time he joined the music faculty at Yeshiva University. He headed the music department at the time of his death.

In a press release about Dr. Levy, Noyes Bartholomew writes "In his own musical works, Dr. Levy drew inspiration from two rich sources: bebop jazz and modernist twelve-tone music. A high school clarinetist and saxophonist, he was fifteen at the end of the war. Soon, with the lifting of the wartime recording ban, he became entranced by the challenging new arrangements recorded by the Sauter-Finegan band. Exploration of this trend led him to the discovery of bebop in the small jazz clubs along 52nd Street in Manhattan. Later in his teens, he learned of similar steps toward dissonance and freedom of form in classical music. Dr. Levy's own music throughout his long career projects his efforts to integrate, with varying balances, these seemingly diverse idioms, idioms that he understood as reflections of each other."

In the context of his social activism, Ed spoke frequently about the need for religious leaders of all faiths to advance the interrelated causes of environmental protection, immigration reform, and population control. His challenging essay for the Spring 1995 issue of The Social Contract on the influence and teachings of religious communities described Jewish attitudes toward these matters. Most recently he had developed a college course at Yeshiva University on the preservation of the environment which was well-received.

Sharon Barnes, a long-time friend and chair of FAIR's board of directors said, "Ed Levy will always have a special place on our hearts. His superior intelligence, original way of thinking and explaining things, and boundless energy will be missed."

We at The Social Contract echo those sentiments and add that we will miss Ed's marvelous good humor and his compassionate leadership.

About the author

John H. Tanton, M.D., is publisher of The Social Contract