Books
Fox, C. L. & Radziwill, Catherine & Mellquist, Jerome & Ross, J. Elliot & Goulding, Stuart D. & Brunini, John Gilland & Chamberlain, John & Chase, Mary Ellen
BOOKS The Road to Savagery Our Business Civilization, by James Truslow Adams. New York: Albert and Charles Boni. $3.00. JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS writes as a disciple of Matthew Arnold, as one for whom...
...It is a little Agony and a Golgotha such as Catholics seldom are called upon to undergo...
...which bemoans the lack of good conversation in America, has been written, in effect, some time ago by Albert Jay Nock...
...Catholicism does not figure in the consciousness of these men as a means of social justice...
...Unfortunately it does not stand because its single blocks are unsound assertions...
...John Gilland Brunini...
...Yet ever friends of God would appear on the earth, helpers of God...
...The book contains passages of a lyric grandeur that place it miles above the usual historical novels...
...Evident in every line, every phase is that conscious care which can never be satisfied with anything but the best in the imagination, the experience, the training of the poet, that meticulous nicety, that pruning and polishing which Horace in his Ars Poetica calls "the labor of the file...
...How many more are bound indirectly to them, and what is the degree of their abuse ? We know so little we must know more...
...Our Business Civilization is an example of a more valuable thing than abstract theorizing: it is will opposing the flux of American life...
...Have we failed as followers of a carpenter and of lowly fishermen...
...His tales must appear in magazines which may revel in money only if they soothe the reader and the advertiser...
...The author never examines them...
...It is not by any means certain that all values must submit themselves to evolutionary influence...
...Nevertheless, much of what he writes has at least an indirect application to the Catholic Church...
...Faith drew him but his reason repelled submission to the Church...
...That best, too, is presented in an abundance of varied forms and measures...
...O'Brien, we then see, is twice neglectful: for the sake of his thesis he neglects to include the fact that Lardner's writing has often been cheapened because of the magazines...
...Before he concludes, Mr...
...1 HIS book is not accurate enough in its personal details to be history, and on the other hand there is almost too much real history in it to class it as a novel...
...AS AN index to the American Brahmin mind during the past half-century, the letters of Mr...
...O'Brien, the anthologist, has always sought to enrich the fiction of our magazines by favoring the artist against the glittering trickster, whether in the Dial, the Post, or other periodicals...
...If humanity more and more disorders itself by means of its inventions, should the inanimate instruments be accused of the change...
...Do we know the nature and the extent of the standardization, the effect upon the goods, the condition of the laborers...
...Clearly, Mrs...
...fighting as allies with Him for the kingdom of man, and in the end God would win...
...he therefore really tells us nothing...
...his plots must be flashy, his endings happy, his vision harmless...
...For instance, when preachers of any one denomination universally inveigh against cursing and swearing, but let the rich grind down the poor, there will come a time when the poor will seek other religious affiliations rcreate a religion of their own promising some measure of earthly happiness...
...and he somehow contrives to overlook his stories altogether...
...C. L. Fox...
...He objects that the powerful interests in politics preach Jefferson-and live by Hamilton...
...here, too, an "air of sensibility, of refined usage...
...Perry really lived inside his library, and his remarks about books are often singularly acute...
...And Dr...
...To Mr...
...O'Brien going to stifle his enemy...
...Joseph Wood Krutch and the modern temper, and finds it in the unquenchable spirit of adventure which distinguishes America no less in the twentieth century than it did in the eighteenth...
...We must learn to pursue money and power if pursue them we must only in terms of human good...
...Hackenburg met and worked with many who have since been prominent in his state's affairs and a few who are known internationally...
...Almost every value, apparently, has decayed...
...and The Intimate Life of the Last Tzarina...
...His criticism of both writers is consequently scattered and fragmentary...
...and Balloon...
...Padraic Colum, an Irish poet, is the author of many books among which are Wild Earth...
...edited by Edwin Arlington Robinson...
...Briefer Mention Letters of Thomas Sergeant Perry...
...C. L. Fox contributes to the literary reviews...
...To those who talk about our "high standard of living," Mr...
...He was unimpressed with what he termed its child-like innocence...
...Comfortable Adventurous America, by Edwin Mims...
...We must "save the innocence of the young, and always encourage their creative inclinations...
...He decided at length to examine the reasons which he felt were inexorably leading him to the brink of conversion...
...Hence it was tragically ironic that Catholics a few years ago in this country should be defending capitalism so vigorously...
...Adams's paper on May I Ask...
...And what can one man do about it ? about the drift away from any sound concept of the value of the individual...
...In his time Mr...
...The personalities of Prince and Princess Salm-Salm are well portrayed, and the pages describing the sad journey of Carlotta to Paris and Rome leave one breathless with the interest which is sustained in them throughout...
...Catholics can learn much from the experience of those around them...
...Thus, in giving the first section of his book to thirty unballasted complaints, he fails to demolish his enemy...
...It was no accident that the Industrial Revolution, with a proletariat supplanting a peasantry, capitalism and a factory system, seems particularly at home with a Protestant philosophy, and secured its greatest development in Protestant countries...
...He talks on, with cool sobriety, and with the plea, designed to placate those who will denounce him as a calamity howler, that "if a doctor pronounces a patient to have a bad circulation and a dangerous local infection in his leg, it cannot be complained of him that he has failed to speak the whole truth because he has said nothing of what a good husband, a loyal friend and able executive the patient happens to be...
...One is buoyant and resilient in its bright imagery...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...The short and separate verses under the divisions Poems of Mallorca and Records comprise a great variety of rhythms and rhyme schemes, always satisfying, whether they present in terse couplets a kind of colorless and intellectual brightness of swift understanding, or in irregular, unrhymed lines the hurrying notes of "a little headlong tune of Haydn," or in warm and mellow quatrains the golden air of the hilltop monastery of Holy Mary...
...Somewhat in the same fashion is his whitewashing of Frank Harris's senile literary offenses...
...he must varnish over the emptiness of his work...
...He was the pastor of a large flock and his position in the Church of England was of sufficient importance so that his conversion would greatly influence the lives of many...
...2.50...
...Such an idea, as well as such an ideal, springs to one's consciousness in the reading and study of Mrs...
...2.50...
...His punctilious observance of the proprieties of his medium will diffuse through all he writes a general air of sensibility, of refined usage...
...2.50...
...So, if we are to dominate the machine we must unravel these predicaments...
...And the same thing happens when racial or nationalistic aspirations are denied...
...Sensitive Craftsmanship Witch and Other Poems, by Grace Hazard Conkling...
...O'Brien, American writers conform to a short story which is shackled to the machine...
...Moreover, in a divided Christendom religion has become the tool not only of class against class, but of nation against nation...
...It is a manifestation of them...
...Religion and Sociology The Social Sources of Denominationalism, by H. Richard Niebuhr...
...I like exceedingly its last ten pages...
...He does not tell us how...
...Nevertheless it would not be fair to dismiss his indictment of Tammany Hall and Tammany Hall leaders as the colored accusations of a sorehead...
...A second disappointment is that the author sometimes omits information...
...as if truth were always to be found in the striking of an average...
...But the fact that Mr...
...Mary Ellen Chase is a professor of English in Smith College and the author of The Golden Asse and Other Essays...
...Must we forever tend to confuse "news" and "truth...
...Father Vernon had read, he tells us, the autobiography of Saint Teresa which a Catholic nun had given him...
...Anoelo Lipari is a professor in the department of Romantic Languages, Yale University...
...And what are we doing to deserve the miracle...
...It may be that he will succeed in disturbing them...
...Finally, how is Mr...
...A Solitary Parade is a complacent book...
...2.50...
...IT IS to be feared that Mr...
...New York: The Yale University Press...
...Anderson has consequently been imprisoned again in business, he affirms, while the "struggle is heroic" for Hemingway...
...She must, one thinks and hopes, be satisfied in knowing she has given her best...
...There is real greatness in the paragraph which says that "the spirit of God would struggle through in men, giving here a vision, there a law...
...Reporting that he had subscribed to le Temps for nearly forty years, he confessed that his countrymen were "much tainted with barbarous ways...
...The method employed, however, is not that of reasoned philosophic continuity, but is rather that of a balancing of testimony pro and con, and a resolution of difficulties through compromise and the golden mean...
...Now a question comes...
...Are we too much in the sacristy, as Cardinal Manning complained, and not enough among the dock workers following his example...
...Furthermore, Mr...
...2.50...
...He and other frightened commentators appear to ignore the fact that the human soul is independent of change, while the mind is dynamic and invents progress upon which to spend its energies...
...Smith nor to the reader...
...LEONORA EYLES has written what is in every way a remarkable work, and the only reproach which I offer is that it leaves us in doubt as to what her real beliefs are...
...One must deplore, also, the fact that the delightful passages descriptive of New York life in the nineties stand alone as a vivid background against which this minor tragedy in the warfare between idealistic and practical politics is acted...
...The poem Witch, that lends the volume its name, is in itself an interchange of forms necessary to varying moods-here a sonnet, there a succession of quatrains...
...If Father Vernon has left anything unsaid, any Protestant doubts unanswered, it is the doubt concerning the veracity of the Gospels and their authenticity...
...We expect more of him when he turns to the short story...
...FATHER VERNON'S book reveals the thought process of one convert to the Faith who had been as firmly Protestant as he later became Catholic...
...The writer, he contends, is really a mechanism with no other choice than conformity...
...Nevertheless he enjoyed observing them attentively, described the New Republic as "another red sheet that worships Lenin and Trot-zky and at times contains readable articles on books," shrugged his shoulders at the "Church of Rome," and despised the movies...
...As a professor in a Lutheran seminary, Dr...
...Any priest with pastoral experience in a big city knows the consolation many poor people get out of their Catholicism...
...Nor does one need to have read far into legislative annals to know that what he has to say about the involved procedure of law-making is undiluted truth...
...Behind it all there is a deep knowledge of the conditions under which was enacted the drama of Queretaro, and all the circumstances which led to it...
...A Crown for Carlotta, by Daniel Henderson...
...The Pageant of America, Volume II: The Lure of the Frontier, by Ralph Henry Gabriel...
...He is gallant and willing, like Don Quixote...
...Jerome Mellquist...
...Perry are nothing short of priceless...
...For she has shown that in the frenzied "making of many books" one may with care and patience keep one's literary conscience not only clear but harmonious and ordered...
...But after one has said this, it is impossible not to praise the style of the author, nor to succumb to the interest which he contrives to maintain all through its pages...
...Hoover's argument...
...Conkling's volume is at once a delight and a reassurance...
...he asks us, "In the name of every high ideal that man has ever cherished" when are we going to start to build a civilization on material resources if not now...
...Adams will not do...
...He needs to clarify his problem...
...The prime value of the book he has written is that it calls attention to its point, elaborates its point, orchestrates its point . . . until it is bound to have its fruition in the proselytizing of others who are infected by its spirit...
...But we do know that machinery is not, despite the affirmations of Mr...
...But how shall we learn...
...that it is beginning to be aware of a circumscription which in another hundred years will set it apart as a curious and at the same time unimportant phase of contemporary philosophy...
...The French, the Spaniards, the Irish were Catholics, but not the English...
...Mary Ellen Chase...
...To some readers it must inevitably seem that too much talk is expended upon this idea in the abstract...
...At most he can upset the uncontemplative only...
...Overemphasis likewise injures his argument, for he often implies that the machine alone should be blamed for this avalanche of thirty evils...
...Did she intend her book to be an apology of Judaism such as it was conceived by Moses, or did she simply mean to present to us the moving story of his achievements and the migration of the Hebrews out of Egypt toward the plains of Palestine...
...And it is from such labor as this, one must believe, that there inevitably ensues that "mysterious harmony of expression" which constituted the literary faith of Flaubert, a harmony inevitably resulting when with invincible patience one searched and waited for the discovery of the one unique form and turn of expression...
...Our ethics are "dissolving...
...O'Brien is among them...
...Such is the structure of the author...
...J. Elliot Ross...
...He can only speak out, as Henry Adams spoke out, and as James Truslow Adams now speaks out...
...New York: The Macaulay Company...
...Yet such neglect will certainly be undeserved for many can find profit, as well as entertainment, in this account of a naturalized immigrant's participation in New York politics and his voluntary withdrawal at the moment when his career was mounting to a climax, because his ideals would not permit him to continue...
...Even Tammany itself has repudiated the idea that there is a new Tammany...
...It is "impersonal," he claims, "its ideal is standardization," "it encourages mass production...
...another possesses a kind of archness which might be deceiving were it not for the swift drop to a minor note at its close...
...THIS is a brave attempt on the part of Professor Mims to accommodate the horrid implications of ultra-modern metaphysics and the comfortable conviction that all is for the best in the best possible of worlds, to which school of thought he himself adheres...
...To cease talking is to give up the battle, and that Mr...
...The theme of standardization, of mass production, of the low state of political life in America, are old stories...
...his sheep would be left without their shepherd...
...Hackenburg was a little bit too sure of his own Tightness as "a leader of lost causes on Capitol Hill" and more than a little bit too convinced of the value of what he achieved in his political heydey...
...As a result the book will be a valuable acquisition for the historical student and a fascinating one to place in the hands of children who have reached the wild-west-story age...
...Yet his discussion is disappointing, first of all because he calls the machine to blame for the deficiencies of our fiction...
...I'll cross with ships a hundred times a year, I'll nudge the ribs of liners lifting sheer As fabulous whales, yet hug my liberty, And burrow with a snout of ebony Under the swaying schooners and the queer Rust-tarnished, sulky tramps that stagger and roll, Hearing the bow draw breath and the foam rustle, Or whirl at evening from the sea's control Into the light and dare the setting sun To plunge and race with me and wallow in fun, A thing of fluent bones and golden muscle...
...Catherine Radziwill...
...In short, thinks Mr...
...The Reformation was not, to be sure, a 'revolt of the rich against the poor,' but in its final outcome it established churches which offered religious sanctuary to bourgeoisie and nobility but sent the poor away empty to find some other home for their faith...
...but the author does not even mention it...
...In Brooks's Americans Coming-of-Age the problem was clarified by the happy division of Americans into "high-brow" and "low-brow"-the "high-brows" being the American clubwomen who have cornered all the culture, and the "low-brows" being the men, who have ceased to honor literature and art as male interests, and who honor "pure science" only after it has been translated into profit for the exploiters of ideas developed in the laboratory...
...Stuart D. Goulding is managing editor of the Madison Eagle, Madison, New Jersey...
...Jerome Mellquist is a new contributor to The Commonweal...
...New York: The Thistle Press...
...a convert who was also a clergyman of the Church of England with a distrust and distaste for things Popish...
...The completeness with which Father Vernon examined the Church is set forth in beautiful prose in his book and his findings constitute a remarkable document...
...Do such conformity and such shackledom really exist...
...Though we may agree that the popular magazines are indeed discouraging to American literature, we do not forget that Ring Lardner has always written for them...
...Indeed, to one admirer of this small volume, so beautifully complemented in its appearance by the good taste and originality of its publishers, the obvious workmanship of the poet is more impressive even than the measures, the cadences, the atmosphere, the imagery of her poetry...
...CONTRIBUTORS Donald C. Anderson, a Pittsburgh attorney, is counsel for the Election Frauds Committee of the Allegheny County Bar Association...
...He was a whimsical, studious, wise, Protestant and occasionally crusty aristocrat, who held the attention of some of the best minds of his age...
...In spite of a tendency to rationalization, particularly in his treatment of religion, he has made out a case which appears to satisfy himself, and will, if it gains a hearing, bring comfort to many helpless book club members, who have been so gratuitously supplied with doubts they never expected to have...
...Surely no one who knows the sea can fail alike to experience here the rise and fall of the ship and to delight in the "sulky tramps," "rust-tarnished," "swaying schooners...
...Conkling's new collection of poems...
...O'Brien appraises Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway...
...If the truth be true, then it ought to be proclaimed again and again in a society that knows it not...
...Ten years ago Van Wyck Brooks made us familiar with the central problem in American culture, the problem that is phrased by Adams in the words, "Can a great civilization be built up or maintained upon the philosophy of the counting-house and the sole basic idea of profit...
...and, secondly because of its timeliness in accentuating the recent and momentous discovery that materialistic thought is at the end of its tether...
...There is little that is new in this book...
...Is this our fault...
...It is true that the Catholic Church is much more universal than any sect in the sense of embracing and satisfying folk of every social class...
...yet he too will be futile unless he girds slowly, and with sure weapons...
...These are unforgettable...
...In the delicacy of its workmanship as well as in the sensitiveness and beauty of its finished work Mrs...
...Adams has achieved a scale of values for himself, and he feels that it is only fair to put American civilization to the test of those values in the interests of others who may feel with them...
...But, at least to the reviewer, the richest treasures of the volume lie in the series of ten sonnets called Steamer Letter...
...Hence he must nettle neither of these...
...Hack-enburg's exposition of the evolution of a district leader, his power and his benevolent despotism, is no exaggeration...
...O'Brien, having foreseen the query, replies that he overemphasizes deliberately: those who have unknowingly been muddling machine and human values must be jarred into thinking...
...He went to Lisieux, however, and there amid the many souvenirs of her life he felt for the first time that he was in the actual presence of the supernatural...
...Stuart D. Goulding...
...His paper on President Eliot's formula of education for "power and service" chimes in with Irving Babbitt's recent Forum criticism of the ideals of the Harvard educator...
...For Mr...
...This hope, to be sure, is tiny...
...His need is to clinch his claims...
...Where there is no direct antagonism, we are simply ignored...
...Elsewhere he answers all the questions that presented themselves to him with a completeness which will be a joy to the Catholic and a revelation to the Protestant inquiring into the Church...
...Criticism must follow his submission...
...Not propaganda, not an apologia, it is an explanation to the people he left behind him in his old faith...
...Niebuhr is concerned primarily with the Protestant sects...
...Upstream Again A Solitary Parade, by Frederick Hackenburg...
...J. Elliot Ross is a member of the faculty of the School of Religion, Iowa University...
...Adams addresses himself to problems that have disturbed other men is not to be urged against Our Business Civilization...
...and if he rebels he conforms but differently, becoming the reverse of the successful scribbler...
...As a social critic his position combines advantages: he has worked in Wall Street for a dozen years, he is an established historian with a sense of the past, and he has lately been living in England, where the contrast between two civilizations must impinge upon him constantly and sharply...
...All I know is that she is a writer with a brilliant imagination, and a deep sense of veneration for all the great facts and events of history which confront us constantly in life...
...The quiet church, the colorful worship, the sense of solidarity with such a tremendous organization as the Catholic Church, are their escape from the turmoil and hardships of life...
...At present we pursue these for themselves...
...John Chamberlain...
...The Terrible Dynamo Dance of the Machines, by Edward J. O'Brien...
...And this he might do by observing the methods of Stuart Chase in Men and Machines (one of the titles, by the way, in his bibliography...
...Hackenburg, as author, will find himself lone as he was when an Albany assemblyman and that the title of his book will be descriptive of its fate...
...he would be regarded as a traitor...
...One asks because Mr...
...Conkling possesses that invincible patience, and, therefore, that harmony of expression...
...While Adventurous America cannot be accepted as a contribution to philosophical thought, it does have value: first, as bibliography with brief commentary and copious quotation...
...IT IS Walter Pater who contends in his essay on Style that the literary artist is of necessity a scholar...
...His argument in favor of getting off that road into the more humanly valuable byways is persuasive...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...but he must pay by sending away every reader who will not accept his overstatements...
...The Road Round Ireland...
...a third is almost austere in its ironic, yet wistful aloofness...
...His experiences at Lisieux set into flame a train of thought that had been smoldering for many years and he found himself turning from his Anglo-Catholic convictions toward those of the Catholic Church...
...O'Brien explains neither the Hemingway of the past nor the newer Hemingway, the creator of A Farewell to Arms...
...Adams himself realizes that much of his criticism is familiar to many...
...JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS writes as a disciple of Matthew Arnold, as one for whom the word "culture" has a very definite and rich content...
...and men by their flesh would defile it...
...Adams retorts that it may be a high standard-but it is a high standard on a "low plane...
...The introduction by Mr...
...Hoover's plea for law observance in toto, he comes back with the logical absurdities that are the terminal points of much of Mr...
...The new humanism makes much capital out of the idea of the "will" opposing the "flux...
...He made a second visit to Lisieux and was convinced that there, in modern times, a true saint had lived whose faith had been the Catholic Faith...
...He fought against it as an autumn leaf might fight against the wind and then, as suddenly, he succumbed to it and was swept away with every emotional and mental faculty keenly alive to his new experience...
...London: Sheed and Ward...
...Dorothy Shepard McComb is a Wisconsin poet...
...Exodus Shepherd of Israel, by Leonora Eyles...
...He remarks very shrewdly that a denomination's conception of the sins from which men are to be saved is more important than the theological creed which it expresses...
...O'Brien does not convince us of their reality...
...New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company...
...Her poems are finished and complete...
...If Dr...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...If all of this can be due to the machine one might as well blame it for everything...
...If he is independent he soon is rendered tractable...
...Some other life that is what I shall be...
...The series of interpretative poems, written on the dancing of L'Argentina, are likewise adroitly manipulated to suit the single occasion and its effect...
...And all share an elusive dignity, a restraint, a frugal, well-bred closeness of tone and atmosphere...
...Nevertheless, we should not shut our eyes to the fact that outside the Church various social movements from trade unionism to Bolshevism are entirely un-Catholic...
...His impressions of Alfred E. Smith were inferentially unfavorable but his summary disposal of the man, who as governor headed the party to which the author adhered, is neither fair to Mr...
...I will confess that I have not been able to come to a conclusion on this point, nor to make up my mind as to whether she is herself a Jew or a Gentile...
...O'BRIEN assembles thirty iniquities against his enemy, the machine...
...Adams's opinion, the road to conformity in an effort to "keep up with the Joneses" is the "road back to savagery...
...A miracle of grace is needed to heal the rents in Christ's seamless garment...
...These phrases, and each of his twenty-seven others, merely repeat old contentions...
...Niebuhr is right, the outlook is black...
...If we grant to him, for example, that machinery standardizes, precisely what have we gained...
...To Father Vernon the Catholic Church was a foreign church...
...He seeks an antidote for Mr...
...Niebuhr sees no solid hope of permanent universal peace without religious unity...
...O'Brien, the cause of our predicaments, although it certainly complicates them...
...Rev...
...He has also pondered the book of another Adams, the famous Education of Henry, and has been oppressed by the suspicion that prognostications about democracy implied in its pages have proved all too true...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...How many people are chained to machines, and how much are they injured...
...In the first place, each is complete in itself, in its own mood...
...Professor Mims is appalled by the audacity and ruthlessness of the moderns-as are most normal people-and dreads on the other hand being "the last to lay the old aside...
...Or are we so lacking in facts, cases and statistics that "standardization" remains but a word of Mr...
...For there is no more chance of getting Rome to accept the proposals of Protestant enthusiasts for union, than of getting Protestants to accept the whole of Catholicism...
...NECESSARILY the limits of one volume compress the history of the American frontiers into brief sketches...
...Father Vernon's Odyssey One Lord-One Faith: An Explanation, by Vernon Johnson...
...Here assuredly is "punctilious observance...
...Here in this sequence occurs, too, the best imagery in the book, an imagery largely dependent for its perfection upon an impeccable choice of adjectives and of verbs: But if you see a porpoise leaping clear, No matter when it is, oh, think of me...
...The Authority of Our Lord, the Church in the New Testament and the Papacy in the New Testament, difficulties which beset every honest and intelligent convert, are here presented with remarkable clearness...
...Princess Catherine Radziwill of Russia is the author of They Knew the Washingtons...
...Perhaps that is why he has written such a clear, sensible, restrained and convincing book about the influence of social conditions upon the rise of the various denominations...
...Earnest men are trying to teach us, and Mr...
...For these reasons, and because he still felt considerable doubt, he decided to examine every motive that impelled him forward...
...New York: Har court, Brace and Company...
...John Gilland Brunini is a member of The Commonweal staff...
...Again, if Lardner has subdued the devil of conformity others may also achieve their maturity within the magazines...
...Kathkyn Worth is a North Carolina poet...
...In Mr...
...Count Carlo Sforza, formerly Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, is the author of a volume soon to be published...
...And in Is America Young...
...O'Brien's, instead of a tool by which to comprehend and to control the machine...
...John Chamberlain is on the staff of the New York Times Book Review...
...The machine has robbed our two finest story writers of a religious faith, a general philosophy and a principle of unity...
...in the words of Walter Lippmann, we must begin to "put a term upon that pursuit of money, of power, and of excitement" which befuddles modern men everywhere...
...Robinson is shrewd, acidy and pleasant to the taste...
...In what is perhaps his best chapter, that of Mass Production and Intellectual Production, he quotes a batch of alarming statistics to show that professors can no longer afford to remain on the campus, for they are "pinched between the two classes benefiting by mass production"-"the owners above setting ever higher standards of living and the operatives below pressing steadily past them in an orgy of material well-being...
...He thinks the older generation "has lost its spiritual bearings by its mad scramble for money...
...then they in their time will be able to "stare down machinery...
...O'Brien tries to pyramid his thirty assertions: materials are degraded first, then the worker is cheapened, creativeness next is deadened, and finally, as if at the apex, instead of the "saint, the hero, and the artist, the machine offers mankind a new mysticism of material things...
...NIEBUHR modestly admits that he cannot pretend to qualify as a sociologist...
...while the body, the mind, the very spirit of man, have been blighted by iron mechanisms...
...His observations on The Mucker Pose are aimed to combat our cult of the primitive in slang, in manners, in morals...
...2.50...
...For proof he simply scaffolds upon the American short story his thirty charges against the machine...
...At the same time Volume II of the Pageant of America series omits none of the vital details of an epic story which mainly involves the white man's conquest of woodland, prairie and desert, and his subjection of the Indians...
...Hence his rather lame dependence upon compromise to bring about the peace of mind which he very obviously set out to acquire...
...Ernest A. Dewev is on the staff of the Hutchinson News, Hutchinson, Kansas...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 14
