America! America!
Macdonald, Dwight
Dwight Macdonald writes: "America! America!" was written early this year as a New York letter to Encounter. The editors accepted it, then a month or so later rejected it, then almost...
...Indeed, the use of troops, objectionable in principle as a violation of states' rights (since other means of enforcing the law had by no means been exhausted), has inflamed and prolonged the infection...
...casualties on litters were often callously abandoned beside the road...
...3) The American landscape is lovely save where American man has touched it, and since by now he has touched it almost everywhere one is likely to go—and torn down the structures of earlier American men who had more sense of fitness—we live in ugliness...
...Thus the latest effective authority (as with the Americans obeying their Communist guards but not their own officers) is the one the isolated, rootless American obeys...
...The reviewers have become so disoriented through constant exposure to potboilers that they assume almost automatically that any book which is clearly not written for the market is to be taken seriously...
...There is the great American roadside, lined with motels and diners and hot-dog stands, paved with the best quality concrete (and the worst quality intentions) that writhes through the land like a tapeworm...
...very few seemed to be interested even in providing themselves with the basic necessities of food, warmth, and shelter...
...Not only that it's blatant and vulgar...
...In our frontier West, as every moviegoer knows, differences of opinion were settled with six-shooters...
...Out of every ten American houses, eight (81 per cent) now have television sets, almost nine (87 per cent) have washing machines, and practically all (96 per cent) have electric refrigerators...
...The average prisoner seemed lost without a bottle of pills and a toilet that flushed...
...This is not as trivial as it might seem...
...This is not individualism, it might better be called floating collectivism...
...Thus a goodwill tour ended up with the marines...
...Americans think of the ideal age as somewhere around twenty...
...In this, they were successful: "Most returned prisoners expressed sincere gratitude for the way the Chinese treated them...
...This was partly . . . the result of some new failure in the childhood and adolescent training of our young men—a new softness...
...But I do feel obliged, because I think readers have a right to know when a magazine makes an editorial decision for extraneous reasons, especially this kind of reason, But I must also state that (a) the Paris office is not ordinarily consulted about manuscripts (mine apparently was shown to one of the Paris boys merely as a matter of interest—the editor thought he'd enjoy it...
...all have what automen call "gasoline in their veins...
...When manners are defective, ego clashes nakedly against ego, the I collides with The Other, and the results are distressing and even catastrophic...
...We have more of everything a human being can conceivably, and inconceivably, want than Fourier, Proudhon, or Marx could have imagined possible...
...but it was also that they had lived too long in the land of plenty: What struck Major Anderson most forcibly was the almost universal inability of the prisoners to adjust to a primitive situation...
...I'm sorry to feel obliged to make all this public, because I like Encounter's editors (and even its front-office Metternichs) and because I very much enjoyed the year I spent in London on Encounter...
...After this putsch against Huckleberry Finn, another news item appeared...
...Our values are not anchored securely, not in the past (tradition) and not in the present (community...
...And there are the cities, vast deserts of the present that sometimes look spectacular from a distance, like the Grand Canyon—and are as pleasant to live in...
...There I was in my white Continental, and I was wearing a pure-silk, pure-white, embroidered cowboy shirt and black gabardine trousers...
...The point was illustrated during Mr...
...In London and Tuscany, where the idea of a community persists, the old are a normal part of life...
...IN THE BALMY pre-Goldfine days, Sherman Adams, the "Assistant President," revealed that the actual President had asked "some able people" to work up "a world-wide cultural conference" on ways and means of Using Scientific Progress for Peace not War...
...Meanwhile, every week, new legions, shepherded by their literary buglemen (OED: "soldiers placed in front of regiment while drilling to show the motions and time"), march bravely into the valley of death...
...So, Mr...
...The people in Paris felt the Letter was exaggerated, one-sided, unfounded, and in bad taste, and they feared it might cause American foundations to cut off supplies...
...ing from the AFL-CIO recognition as the collective-bargaining agent for its 225 organizers, as well as grievance procedures, a better pension plan, and higher dismissal pay...
...the Italians with a vivacious pleasure in the human otherness of The Other...
...This emerged in their response to questions about what their service unit had been...
...A traveller back from New Guinea says the natives sum it up: "This fella Sputnik him bugger-up Uncle Sam...
...I ARRIVED IN LONDON in the summer of 1956 just as the reputation of Colin Wilson's The Outsider was swelling to its most majestic proportions, and I got back to New York just in time to witness the similar inflation of James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possesesd, which was unanimously praised by the critics and which was for months at the top of the fiction best-seller lists...
...Nor is the hinterland exactly pacific...
...Friends have suggested that perhaps the same applies to me, that if I spent not one year but five in London my admiration for the British way of life might be considerably moderated...
...At first, the badly wounded suffered most...
...An Esso lubricant that makes pop bottles shiny: "Oil research adds a bright note to your moments of pleasure...
...It was partly that no one washed them, fed them, kept them on their feet—"I got mine—screw you, Jack...
...The Executone, an inter-office communication system with "built-in courtesy"—about the only kind you get around an American office—that announces calls by "soft chime and signal light...
...Since I have analyzed at some length in the January Commentary both the novel and the nonsense written about it, I won't re-hash it all here...
...It is perhaps the critic's most important job to discriminate between the true-good and the false-good, since the humbler practitioners of best-sellerdom are so easily distinguished that they don't threaten our standards...
...I didn't wear them," grins George...
...There is a terrible shapelessness about American life...
...A toothpaste that is shot out by compressed air at the touch of a button (no more of that laborious squeezing), and another that comes out in red and white stripes...
...there is a bottom, some things aren't done...
...The British and the French weren't popular with their wards, but they weren't laughed at...
...The major difference, certainly of cultural interest, was that while there were three hostile reviews of The Outsider in important places (The Times Literary Supplement, Spectator, Encounter), over here the only hostile reviews of By Love Possessed were in two distinctly minor periodicals (National Review, Yale Review...
...The protest was effective and fewer "undignified" roles were offered to Negro actors...
...On the other hand, Eisenhower's instant explosion of anger when he learned of the violence in Caracas, and his instant reflex: send in the marines...
...Bar-tenders," he explained, "see more people with social problems than social workers do...
...Racial integration is as explosive an issue in the South as anti-Yanquism is in Latin America, and with as deep roots...
...Lewis observed at the time...
...They lacked the old Yankee resourcefulness...
...Cozzens (not to dwell on his considerably greater talent as a writer) never had the kind of sales they have been enjoying...
...The Italians are excitable and passionate, they shout, curse, and gesture broadly...
...People might think I was eccentric...
...In a single recent issue of the New York Times there is a report of a twelve-year-old girl being raped in a Brooklyn public school by a fifteen-year-old fellow-student...
...He even smells stylish, slathering on Fauberge cologne so liberally that it lingers on long after he leaves the room...
...But the really awful thing is that the American people like what he and his 650 young artists produce...
...The consumer has manfully, doggedly done his best...
...John Foster Dulles, the pious Artful Dodger, is our perfect prototype in world affairs...
...The over-50 population will grow next fastest...
...But it may be interesting to compare the two episodes...
...They have been able to free themselves from parental control because they have their own money (our post-1940 prosperity means bigger allowances for teen-agers and also bigger earnings from spare-time jobs) and because the parents, like other ruling classes in history, have lost confidence in their right to rule—in this case because of progressive education and of Freudian theories...
...Reported cost: $30,000...
...The Negro janitor of my apartment building has a bigger, sleeker one than I have ever been able to afford...
...While this is on the whole good, it also means that another disruptive force in our society—which I think could do with a little more disrupting—has been neutralized...
...The ordinary reader, precisely because he is less involved in the cultural mechanism, often reacts with more sense and sensibility than the critics...
...For them, the customs and the landscape are as strange as if it were Java or Tibet, and they find it all "stimulating" and "fascinating," as I dare say it is if you don't have to live here...
...James Reinhardt of • A friend who chances to have a thirteen-year-old girl cousin in this school says her response to the rape and the newspaper publicity was: "My, aren't we getting popular...
...THE New Yorker for October 26, 1957 contained some extremely important (and extremely disturbing) data on the American Way of Life: a lengthy article by Eugene Kinkead summarizing the findings of a team of Army experts, mostly psychiatrists, who have completed a man-by-man study of the 4,428 American soldiers who came back from Communist prison camps after the Korean war...
...I remember what a London journalist, years ago, remarked to me, apropos Henry Luce's organization: "I can deal with gangsters or with Boy Scouts, but I must admit I'm at a loss with Boy Scouts who act like gangsters...
...Why not...
...Eisenhower's handling of the Little Rock school integration crisis is curiously parallel, and not only because the 101st Airborne Division was involved both times...
...Especially when two of our serious quarterlies, the American Scholar and the Hudson Review, have printed respectful notices...
...Instead of just listening to a customer with a problem, these trained bar-tenders would be able to refer them to the proper community agency...
...I can't say I entirely envy him...
...Quite a large majority-87 per cent, in fact...
...When one remembers Ludlow, Harlan, and other mine-workers' battles in this century, one is again impressed by the phenomenon of John L. Lewis, the Winston Churchill of our labor movement, a leader of large, courageous, and retrograde views who in 1946 bullied the mine-owners into financing the Fund...
...In fact, judging by its ads, American capitalism is mature to the point of decadence...
...For several generations, our economy has been organized around consumption rather than production...
...The editors accepted it, then a month or so later rejected it, then almost immediately re-accepted it, and finally after another six weeks definitively rejected it...
...Dysentery was common in the camps and . . . on winter nights, helpess men with dysentery were rolled outside the huts by their comrades and left to die in the cold...
...According to Fortune (June, 1954), we spend over $30 billion a year on pleasure ("The Great Fun Market"): sports, travel, hunting and fishing, books and magazines, liquor, gardening, home workshops, movies and television, etc...
...On the marches back from the line...
...The majority of American prisoners "yielded in some degree to Communist pressure...
...Adams in one of the longest rhetorical questions since Demosthenes, "Who is there who can say that a convocation in this country of scholars, historians, artisans [sic], theologians, educators, sociologists, philosophers, artists, and musicians—representatives of the cultural pursuits of all the human race—meeting each other in their respective groups, could not suggest new and better ways for human beings to exist peaceably together and to reap the greatest rewards from man's scientific discoveries...
...The editors did what they could—hence the shifting—but ultimately yielded...
...He told me that the AFL -CIO disregarded seniority in cutting down its fieldstaff, selecting for immediate discharge those who belonged to the union...
...troopers to our military bases in the Caribbean, lest the Communists have trouble keeping green the memory of Haiti and Nicaragua...
...A beer-foaming machine that sends "a silent sound wave" (?) of "21,000 cycles a second...
...of a traffic argument terminated by one driver shooting the other and then later killing himself...
...This is presumably a supplement to the guided missile program...
...Many of the 2,730 prisoners who died, died because they simply lay down and gave up...
...Each does it differently, the British with all sorts of formal, moral, legalistic inhibitions against interfering with the "rights" of The Other...
...and also that such intervention is extremely rare...
...He shrugged...
...1945 imperial role has forced us to do—never has a world power taken up the insignia of imperium so reluctantly—we don't impress them...
...But we think of them as has-beens, forgetting that what has been is sometimes better than what is and in any case is the root of what will be...
...There are some issues that yield neither to the public-relations smile nor to the paratroopers...
...Protecting the rear lest a certain backward country "catch up with and overtake" us in the March of Progress...
...With them, it's a noble cause, and we're betraying the workers when we organize...
...2) I think the lack of manners is connected with the sense of violence one has in this country...
...Everybody but me has a new car...
...In these antinomies fatally appears our lack of style...
...In short, Mr...
...Young Charles Starkweather killed eleven people in three days, for various reasons: because they disapproved of his "dating" their daughter, because they had cars or other possessions he wanted, or because they happened to be around...
...Doubtless Mark Twain should have had his backwoodsmen refer to "Miss Watson's big Negro named Jim...
...It was all very American...
...The Chinese Communists who ran the camps exploited it...
...That the book is (in part) a protest against the indignity of slavery, that Jim is its moral hero— these trivia didn't weigh in the scale against "nigger...
...5) Our Cult of Youth...
...Most puzzling...
...This is a very American reaction...
...The new cars are hideous beyond the imagination of a Dante (or a Steinberg), mobile juke-boxes that violate every principle of taste and functionalism, longer and lower and more insanely powerful than ever, lathered with chrome in fantastic zigs and zags and rhomboids, their behinds elongated and streamlined until one can't tell if they're coming or going, with upswept fins and quadruple tail-lights winking and gleaming like a moon-rocket about to take off...
...The basic reason was the same as that which had caused the high death rate, a lack of solidarity: Major Segal told me that most of the repatriates came home thinking of themselves not as a part of a group, bound by common loyalties, but as isolated individuals...
...About the same time as the above, the Nebraska National Guard was called out to protect the people of Lincoln, the state capital, against a 19-year-old boy...
...Naturally, the chaos was encouraged by the Communists, who told the captives...
...By comparison, in London or in Tuscany one lives embedded in the past, a state of being I, personally, like.* (4) There: a community, each person differentiated by status and function but each a part of an orderly social structure...
...Not a good showing...
...as recently as 1940, it was only nine years...
...In the next two decades, this will become crucial because both Old and Young will increase much faster than the rest of us...
...Or both...
...There: continuity with the past, so that some level is taken for granted...
...A stylist," says Walker, "has got to show style in his cars, in his home, his clothes, and his person...
...Even the English seem to have more joie de vivre...
...His appetite must be stimulated by outré refinements: A left-handed check-book...
...He owns 40 pairs of shoes (at $60 a pair), 70 suits, once had Saks Fifth Avenue make up four "cocktail suits" (at $250 apiece) in white with blue braid, white with black braid...
...The President of the United States," spoke the Secretary of State to the Venezuelan ambassador, "expects the authorities in Venezuela to take every possible measure to protect the Vice-President...
...I asked him why...
...The employer has not only refused to bargain, but also has very nearly fired almost half of its organizers.* One report is that AFL-CIO is planning to initiate a million-dollar publicity campaign, financed in part with what it will save by cutting its organizing staff...
...Mom, I'm famous...
...The critics and the mob find a common ground: both feel they are doing their duty by Culture.* But there are differences...
...There has even developed a union of union organizers, the Field Representatives' Federation which for many months has been demand...
...The tourist's exotic is the native's poison.** * I have just returned (Sept...
...A fountain pen that fills itself by capillary attraction...
...Walker...
...The Army made the study to find out what lay behind two shocking statistics: (1) "roughly one out of every three American prisoners in Korea was guilty of some sort of collaboration with the enemy," and (2) over one-third of our war prisoners-2,730 out of 7,190—died in captivity...
...Like Churchill, he exaggerated, but not much...
...The only way he could become important was by killing...
...This, of * I ran across one recently, a veteran New Dealer I have known and respected foryears...
...Look, mom, I'm famous...
...Censorship has what our ad-writers would call a Built-In, Automatic Kick-Back...
...rank no longer existed [and] they were all equal as simple prisoners of war released from capitalist bondage...
...6) When we come into contact with other peoples, as our post...
...Max Beerbohm, for example, a far more original and vigorous thinker than either Mr...
...But there are lots of Irish, Italian, and even "good Anglo-Saxon" names in our daily crime reports...
...Who is there who can say," asked Mr...
...Americans are generous, kindly, and hospitable to people they've been introduced to, but their "street manners" are atrocious, as are the manners of those whose jobs bring them into constant contact with strangers—taxi-drivers, bus-conductors, sales clerks, waiters, policemen, porters, etc...
...There, in command of an $11,500,000 red-brick styling center set in an expanse of playing fountains and shimmering pools, Style Boss Walker works at the head of a staff of 650 artists, draughtsmen, modellers, and engineers...
...A heartshaped electrical anti-snoring device called "Turn Over, Darling" that buzzes under the pillow of the party of the first part when the party of the second part presses a button ($10...
...An underwater scooter that motorizes lazy skin-divers ($350...
...We are contemptuous of Victorian taste, or used to be until we entered the fluorescent age, but what, oh what will they say about these cars in 2058, assuming there is a 2058...
...So far, the social workers are worrying about the old folks, but everyone else is fascinated with the teen-agers...
...The reception Reuther, Frankensten and other pickets got at Ford twenty years ago was rather different, one recalls...
...Here: no bottom, no continuity, no level...
...Like the boy recently arrested for robbing a bank who said to his weeping mother, "Say, look at those headlines...
...The average worker has now completed twelve years of schooling, that is he has gone through high school...
...Wilson or Mr...
...Says Walker happily: "Ain't it sexy...
...It is when you have a sincere and ambitious attempt (to create a new philosophy or to write a "big" novel) that the temptation to be a good fellow and applaud is strongest—and most dangerous...
...Able-bodied prisoners refused to carry them, even when their officers commanded them to do so...
...Even the Soviet Russians, for all their ruthlessness, barely covered by the fig of ideology, seem to speak a more common language with other peoples than we do...
...This was backed up by airmailing four companies of marines and para * Our teen-agers in the last fifteen years have become a new social group, a pressure bloc like labor or the farmers, complete with their own sub-culture (rock-'n-roll, hot-rod cars, horror movies...
...On the one hand, Nixon getting himself chronically mobbed while attempting to spread "goodwill' and let's-talk-it-over-boys reason in those dark regions—"Don't you want to hear facts...
...I can recall no such pressure from Paris while I was there...
...Where the Turks proudly gave their regiment and brigade the Americans were likely to respond with the number of their prison camp...
...They're so damned virtuous...
...ONE OF THE HARDEST things for an ex-patriate to get used to is our advertising...
...The strong regularly took food from the weak...
...Our manners are either bad or non-existent, which is perhaps the same thing...
...Since the real community is too feeble to confer status, the individual looks to the synthetic mass-community of newspaper readers...
...course, is not the case...
...Last fall, the NAACP was therefore constrained to hold a second conference with the MPPA...
...Most are young (average age: 31...
...But this kind of mania seems to be cyclic and we are now recovering our wits...
...These prosperous Americans look more tense and joyless than the people in the poorest quarters of Florence...
...And if there is any lack of will or capacity to give that, we would like to know about it quickly...
...George Walker, vice-president and chief-of-styling at Ford Motors, as reported in Time of November 4 last: George Walker sits in an office fit for an Eastern potentate: a $50,000 production done in creamy-white and black with raw silk draperies, sumptuous leather couches, a jungle of tropical plants along one end, a bank of hi-fi, TV, refrigerators, and cabinets at the other...
...He stressed that the Association wanted to dispel the notion that it insisted on a 'one-for-one policy,' whereby if a Negro were shown in a menial role there must also be a dignified representation of another Negro...
...Says Walker: "You just got to love cars...
...However, By Love Possessed did fail to get either the important National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize...
...Times, "Mr...
...If a Communist guard ordered a litter shouldered, our men obeyed...
...An American soldier goes into the field with comforts that the majority of the world's population doesn't have even at home," said Anderson...
...Or a mess...
...The almost universal note of the ninety-odd letters I have received and of the perhaps twice that many verbal comments is: I couldn't read the book, and so I thought I must be a terrible Philistine because all the reviewers praised it...
...And I can also tell the Research Society for Creative Altruism (founded by Professor Pitirim A. Sorokin of Harvard in 1949) which lately convened at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work out "a scientific approach to man's moral problems," that its efforts will come to naught...
...LAST FALL the New York Board of Education removed Huckleberry Finn from its approved text-book list for public schools because Negro groups had objected to its use of the term "nigger," as in "Miss Watson's big nigger named Jim...
...Eisenhower expects every Venezuelan to do his duty by Nixon...
...Furthermore, both books are ambitious efforts, not pot-boilers for the mass market but the work of serious writers laboring at their very highest bent...
...or better, "Brother"—"friend" and "brother" being used by Americans to express extreme hostility and contempt...
...but Eisenhower first tried to "talk it over" with Governor Faubus, a sort of goodwill tour of an intractable issue, and then, when Faubus, a demagogue with a perfect cause, expectably made trouble, at once went to the other extreme and sent in the troops...
...1) The British and the Italians know how to live together, we don't...
...yet one feels far more secure, physically, in Italy than here...
...otherwise, the wounded were left to die...
...The arts are a chancey field for pressure groups, even ones with aims as admirable as those of the NAACP...
...these constitute "a major problem of family life" —our national symbol is not the overflowing cornucopia but rather the overflowing waste-basket...
...For months . . . most prisoners displayed signs of shock, remaining within little shells they had created to protect them from reality...
...It is a sad fact, but it is a fact [said Major Anderson] that the men who were captured in large groups early in the war often became unmanageable...
...For a long time now —in America this means about ten years—unionism has been part of the normal American Way of Life...
...It Socialism be the equal sharing of plenty, then we are far along the road...
...the Supreme Court since 1954 has been dealing with it admirably, with a combination of firmness and patience...
...they are considered interesting because they know about the past...
...the national motto should be not "E Pluribus Unum," not "In God We Trust," but: "I got mine and screw you, Jack...
...Old people bore us, and we send them to nice rest-homes if we can afford it...
...if the voting had been last fall, it probably would have...
...SINCE I'VE BEEN AWAY, the March of Progress has been progressing...
...Let me put down a few impressions...
...The same tendencies exist in Europe—the same destruction of the order of the past, physical and social, by the cancerous growth of mass society —but they are much less advanced...
...It was not starvation or hardship that caused the high American death rate—the Army report shows the Communists fed their prisoners fairly well...
...I doubt it...
...A new girdle with the perhaps unfortunate name, "Open Sesame...
...The teen-age population* will grow fantastically by some 70 per cent, because of the post-1945 war babies...
...Says he, happily recounting what he considers his "finest moment" while on a vacation in Florida: "I was terrific...
...but in any case, I'm sure my criticism would be directed to quite different defects than the ones I'm conscious of over here...
...The Devil has never lacked arguments...
...American in the notion that a big smile, a firm handshake, and a sincere willingness to Talk It Over will soothe the most savage breast— our old faith in democratic discussion and our new faith in public relations are combined here—and American in the quick resort to force when this naive illusion collapses...
...Etc., etc., etc...
...Life once reported that the average American family has accumulated in its closets and on its shelves about 10,000 separate possessions...
...Unfortunately, space doesn't permit giving the reasons for these predictions, but of their accuracy there is, also unfortunately, no doubt whatsoever...
...it's that too but not so much as Europeans think, and often it's more sophisticated than their advertising...
...15) from my first visit to Los Angeles, which is to New York, so far as attractiveness, sense of the past and human scale, as New York is to London...
...In 1942, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People met with the Motion Picture Producers Association to protest against "the stereotyped representation in films of Negroes as bumbling, comical characters...
...No pen can write, no tongue can tell, no vocabulary of language is large enough to express the many benefits that will come to the American coal-miner and his family through the establishment of the Welfare and Retirement Fund," Mr...
...Anal eroticism...
...the University of Nebraska—no American crime story is complete without the psychologist's report...
...he cried desperately to the students of Lima amidst the jeers and stones...
...Each individual makes his own culture, his own morality, and sometimes very well—our individual saints and savants don't compare unfavorably with those abroad—but it's all on his lonesome...
...it's a jungle in which anything can happen without anybody's thinking it out of the ordinary...
...the bottom may be broken through—as in the London mass newspapers—but at least there is a sense of something being violated...
...I think the difference is that Americans appear to other nations to be somehow at once gross and sentimental, immature and tough, uncultivated and hypocritical, shrewd about small things and stupid about big things...
...Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, said 'misconceptions' had arisen [and] disavowed any intention on the part of the Association to act as a 'censor...
...On the floor spreads a carpet of inch-thick black lambskin...
...Also thatthe most insistent on thus punishing members of the Field Workers' Federationwere the "liberals," notably David Dubinsky and Walter Reuther...
...No nation in history has been richer or has had a more equal distribution of wealth, and since 1940 there has been a fantastic increase in the wealth and a considerable decrease in economic diffierences...
...A minor one, possibly of sociological interest, is that the English reviewers overpraised The Outsider because its author was young (24) and so deserving of encouragement of his first book (I would say our age is much too permissive with the young) while their American colleagues overpraised By Love Possessed because its author was aging (54) and so deserving of encouragement of his twelfth book, especially since none of its predecessors had been a great succes d'estime...
...They refused to obey orders, and they cursed and sometimes struck officers who tried to enforce orders...
...Many men were sick, and these men . . . were ignored, or worse...
...at his plate...
...These shifts reflected the attitude of Encounter's "front office," the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris, which publishes the magazine with funds supplied by several American foundations...
...We are an unhappy people (I felt), a people without style, without a sense of what is humanly satisfying...
...Perhaps they felt that Paris (and its moneyed foundations) was worth a mass...
...Socially he was simply an empty man...
...Different, and I think, less serious...
...Who but the Communists, and in fact the Chinese Communists, would have the boldness to use war prisoner camps as propaganda centers, and the subtlety to make it work...
...He said there was no objection to Negro actors playing 'menial' characters, such as maids, butlers, or janitors, or being cast in comedy roles...
...When I came back to New York last fall, just in time for the Sputnik, after a year in London and two months in Tuscany, I felt I had crossed a boundary much wider than the Atlantic...
...Well, I am one who can say they could not...
...In fact, fewer roles of any kind were offered to them: between 1945 and 1957 the number of Negro movie performers declined from 500 to 125...
...It has so far cost us over four million dollars to keep eight Negro children in Little Rock High School, nor does the wound show signs of healing...
...When they talked about politics, they often used the term 'Socialism' rather than 'Communism'.., and many of them said that while Socialism might not work in the United States...
...Parallel-O-Plate, a new window-glass that "keeps build ings from looking wrinkled...
...And what will they say, what do we say about a phenomenon like Mr...
...So, too, with collaboration...
...Yet we are, I insist, not happy...
...I'm referring to public, not private, manners...
...You just can't do any better than that...
...The Welfare and Retirement Fund of the United Mine Workers announces, for the year ended June 30, 1957, receipts of $157,000,000, of which $138,000,000 was spent on pensions ($100 a month), medical benefits (the UMW now has a string of ultra-modern hospitals and clinics that give its members better medical services than all but the wealthiest non-miners can afford), and payments to widows and orphans...
...THE MARCH OF LABOR has continued...
...was written early this year as a New York letter to Encounter...
...At the meeting," reports the N.Y...
...Take the clean, glistening bottle that lets the sparkle of a soft drink shine through...
...I don't know how many purchasers of The Outsider, after a struggle, sadly put it aside unread, but I do have some data on By Love Possessed...
...of the principal of a city school who killed himself because he was being questioned by a Grand Jury about violent episodes among students (another rape, several assaults on teachers and one on a policeman inside the school).* It's true I live in New York, where there are many Negroes and Puerto Ricans whose crime rate, for understandable reasons, is exceptionally high...
...They did not use physical brutality or executions, because these would have defeated their purposes, which were (minor) to control the prisoners with the least difficulty and (major) to affect their way of thinking...
...of two teen-age girls being stabbed in the back at noon outside a subway station by some teen-age boys who had tried to get money from them...
...In each case, a bad book not only became a best-seller—there's no news in that, after all—but became one because it was extravagantly praised by critics and journals that normally (or so one thought) were more discriminating...
...In fact, I think it was their seriousness, indeed their portentousness, that sold them...
...Of course, they knew their enemy, in this case, U.S., or us...
...18) paper reports that Ford Motors greeted UAW pickets during the six hours the great "strike" was on (it was settled with UAW gains and good feeling all around) with mobile canteens dispensing free coffee and cakes...
...One Leo Perlis, Director of Community Service Activities for the AFL-CIO (that such a post exists is a sign of labor's maturity, if not, indeed, its senility), has revealed that his department is about to train bar-tenders in social-work techniques...
...The Army researchers found there had been "a fantastic amount of fraternizing with the enemy...
...thanks for reassuring me...
...Or rather a few years—most European tourists, except for Madame de Beauvoir, seem to like America...
...When one hears Europeans complaining about the Americanization of Europe, one wishes they could spend a few weeks over here and get a load of the real thing...
...After all, we've been at it longer...
...The class struggle vaporizes into Public Relations...
...Nixon's recent agony in Latin America...
...Here: everybody "equal" in the sense that nobody respects anybody else unless he has to, by force majeure...
...it was a good thing for China and other less advanced nations [shades of Henry Wallace...
...through newlyfilled bottles of beer and thus speeds up capping ($1,570...
...Here was a totally defeated ego which had no satisfactory anchorage in social life," explained Dr...
...There was practically no communication among the men, and...
...Wilkins climbed down...
...but each people in its own way has very good manners...
...Beside me was my jet black Great Dane, imported from Europe, named Dana von Krupp...
...Stop press addendum: Today's (Sept...
...But by now the poor fellow is just picking * "Mob" is perhaps too strong...
Vol. 5 • September 1958 • No. 4
