George N. Shuster: 1894-1977
Skillin, Edward S.
the privilege. In this case, for instance, the Chicago suburb involved would have had to accept an apartment development in which 40 percent of the units were to be occupied by blacks. Instead,...
...At that moment in the talk, the Commonweal: 101...
...I was lucky enough, however, to be with Commonweal for several of the ten years during which he was getting out the magazine as Managing Editor...
...Or to give an adequate idea of what he accomplished for his fellow man and for the Catholic Church in America...
...Occasionally there would be a major article or review under his name or a review with his initials...
...Stephen's Cathedral...
...In all, he was the author of more than twenty published books...
...It was a policy eagerly continued by the new editors with George's help...
...And the government's obsession with security, aided and abetted by people making money out of it, is what has brought us where we are: fiscally a garrison state...
...It is not possible to cite them all...
...Happily, George was also always willing to contribute to the pages of Commonweal down through the years...
...But if the suburbs are to stay lily-white and the cities increasingly black, how are neighborhoods to be integrated...
...Thus this decision appears to be the latest in a continuing series of ever more conservative rulings from the Court on racial matters...
...The ideal presidential security would have been inside the limousine, the limousine lined with steel plate, the presidential image projected onto two, or perhaps four, Advent screens on the roof, it being still a few years early for a mobile, roof-top hologram...
...In reality, such a rule is bound to perpetuate racial discrimination, for normally speaking it will be impossible to prove any such intent in a court of law, however real and glaring the end result may be...
...As early as 1922 he brought out The Catholic Spirit in Modern English Literature...
...And it happened in the spring of 1934 that he hit upon a challenging pedagogical device...
...That possibility was strengthened by a reference in the reassuringly lackluster speech: the new President looked forward to a world without any nuclear weapons in it at all and hoped to take a first step toward that state within the year...
...First of all I recall him as a patient and encouraging mentor...
...The plain fact is that in the Arlington Heights case the Court has given us a bad decision, one that is likely to haunt the nation for years to come...
...The Arlington Heights ruling follows a decision last year in the case of Washington v. Davis, in which the Court ruled that clear proof of racially discriminatory intent, and not just a racially discriminatory impact or effect, was needed to establish a case of unconstitutional racial discrimination in the schools...
...What the Court seems intent on establishing in the Arlington Heights and similar cases, then, is a judicial rule, applying in all cases, that discrimination or segregation must not only be a fact if it is to be ruled out...
...What it was was a flouting of security of the highest order, that of the person of the new President...
...But George Shuster will probably be remembered more for the stands that he took than for his remarkable productiveness and versatility...
...Throughout his life, from his early days in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame, George continually manifested a warm and human interest in developing potential talent...
...WASHIHQTON REPORT CLASHING SYMBOLS Sure it's all been symbolic so far, but the symbols, on balance, have been good...
...it must also be intentional and able to be so proven...
...I don't know whether we have yet fully worked out what he recommended in the course of the discussions: to recognize "the distinction between the Church making up its mind for the Church and the Church making up its mind for the nation on what it wants done...
...That family stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue, from the Capitol to the White House had a little something more to it than the widely noted effort to get, or keep, in touch with the people...
...It was this case which was cited as precedent in the Arlington Heights decision...
...Significantly enough, Justice White, who wrote the majority opinion in the earlier Davis case, dissented in the Arlington Heights ruling, saying that the new decision enunciated "a legal standard nowhere mentioned in Davis"---an indication that the Court has now moved in an even more conservative direction...
...The number of important activities in which George Shuster was actively engaged over the years is overwhelming...
...And how often is there going to be any real chance of proving that...
...There would be pages of his editorials and several reviews of all sorts of books, unsigned, in issue after issue...
...Then he would publish our paragraphs in what he considered to be the order of their merit...
...George was a leading light on the Fund for the Republic, the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace and the National Conference of Christians and Jews...
...He early called for a reexamination of traditional Catholic positions on sexual morality...
...It was then that his Commonweal article about the Nazi takeover expressed the h~3pe that, whatever happened, forces of destruction would not emerge in America "to victory through the Catholic gate...
...Thanks to the Supreme Court, it is again obvious for all to see that this is, in Tom Wicker's quotation from the Kerner Commission report, "two societies, one black and one white --separate and unequal...
...He witnessed the Ansctduss at first hand...
...Then I remember the prodigious amount of writing of his own, on the widest range of subjects, that he contributed to each issue of the magazine especially in the late twenties and early thirties...
...By hoofing it, Carter shrugged, all that off, implicitly gave it the horse laugh it has long deserved...
...In March of 1938, of course, Commonweal changed hands and direction...
...He was president of Hunter College for twenty years and assistant to the president of Notre Dame for a dozen more...
...George Shuster's published books branched out into many fields...
...Instead, it and other suburbs can now continue to restrict dwellings to one-family houses on very large plots--as long as it cannot be proved that the restrictions are racially motivated...
...To some, George Shuster's greatest contribution through Commonweal was his enrichment of the American Catholic cultural scene by introducing to American readers a number of leading representatives of contemporary European Catholic thought...
...And in that case, what chance other than busing is there to achieve integration in American schools...
...The publication of such authors as Karl Adam, Romano Guardini, Baron Von Huegel and the Jesuits of the NouveUe Revue Catholique brought enlightening theological and sociological ideas to what was a decidedly arid terrain over here...
...We have never considered busing the ideal solution to racial imbalance...
...It was personally very instructive...
...As an early American antagonist of the Nazis, he conducted a vigorous campaign against American 18 February 1977:100 and Catholic participation in the 1936 Munich Olympics which he knew Hitler had planned as a Nazi showcase...
...for he saw the German troops march into Vienna to the pealing of the church bells of St...
...George was too anti-Franco to go along with him and the other editors of the American Catholic Press at that time, who were on the Franco bandwagon to a man except for the archdiocesan New World of Chicago and The Catholic Worker...
...His Like a Mighty Army told of the rise of the Hitler movement as a cult that was sapping the strength of the various German Christian churches (1935...
...O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 1894-1977 GEORGE N. SHUSTER It would hardly be possible to do justice in brief compass to the long and varied and distinguished career of George N. Shuster, who died January 25 at the age of 82...
...In view of all this, it will be interesting now to hear from some of the most vocal enemies of school busing to achieve racial balance in the schools...
...To cover his tracks, George soon had to create two frequently recurring, mysterious "contributors": Paul Crowley, "a literary critic for American reviews" and Ambrose Farley, "a translator and teacher of classical poetry...
...It was on the issue of the Spanish Civil War that George Shuster broke with Michael Williams's Commonweal...
...At Commonweal he had a special opportunity to encourage young writers, giving them their first chance at publication...
...It was most fitting, I believe, that his Mass of the Resurrection at snowbound Notre Dame should have been offered on the feast of St...
...He gave us a clear picture of the magazlne's original objectives and the obstacles it encountered at the time...
...Thomas Aquinas...
...May he rest in peace, l~Dw^l~ s. SgaI.LIN (Edward S. SkiUin, who joined the Commonweal sta~ in 1933, become Editor in 1938 and has been Publisher since 1967...
...He served as Land Commissioner for Bavaria, chairman of the Industrial Areas Foundation of Chicago, director of Notre Dame's Society for the Study of Man and as United States Representative on UNESCO...
...One has only to think of Jacques Maritain, Georges Bernanos and the liturgical pioneering of Father H. A. Reinhold among others...
...integrated neighborhoods that produce their own integrated schools are infinitely preferable, and busing is, or should be, a measure of last resort, as last year's Democratic platform pointed out...
...His Education and Moral Wisdom (1960) was one of the several studies George produced on educational subjects...
...At the time of our Fortieth Anniversary in 1964 he took a leading part in a symposium among our past and present editors...
...Each week he would assign to Philip Burnham, the late Frederic Thompson and me paragraph topics for a strictly condensed "Seven Days Survey" of the news...
...As Father Hesburgh said in his eloquent funeral homily, George Shuster was a "great and gentle man...
...That winter walk down the avenue may have started us all on the long march back to sanity in these matters...
...Such decisions raise serious questions about the future: Is the Court that in 1954 began to lead the nation out of the morass of segregation now going to slow that march or even halt it altogether...
Vol. 104 • February 1977 • No. 4
