EDITORIAL COMMENT
EDITORIAL COMMENT HATE AS A WEAPON IF hate could win this war the Germans and the Japs would have been victorious long ago. They have been taught hate by experts. We cannot hope to excel them...
...In justice to Mr...
...One result of this selective character of the emigration is that the leadership of the...
...To make the sanguinary confusion worse confounded, peasants, as Mr...
...The "little man," the worker, the farmer, the civil servant, the teacher seldom has any alternative except to stay and bear all the cruelties and hardships of the occupation...
...the demonstrative adhesion of the French Communists to General de Gaulle has not made it any less so...
...And the very process of war itself tends to develop emotions of intense dislike...
...She was ;not hired to exercise any influence over school policies...
...From SAM STAFF To the Editor: You may be interested in the background and implications of the recent Medical Co-op victory...
...This is a grave question...
...From being a premature, he became a forgotten man...
...But when lists went through her hands she simply crossed off titles which roused a feeling of distaste in her sensitive mind, and they remained crossed off...
...It is compounded of pride in their outfit, in their weapons, in their training—well mixed with the buoyant confidence and good humor of youth...
...This was a so-cal!e.i partisan movement which enjoyed the support of Moscow and which also seems to have attracted support among the non-Serb racial groups in Yugoslavia...
...These men and women are among the best thinkers and writers in this country...
...I am at a loss, therefore, to understand just when Mr...
...It must, however, be said to the credit of such Board members as James Marshall and Johanna Lindloff that this blacklist of progressive writers was ended well before the official investigation took place...
...Over-emphasis on hate is useless during war and may be harmful when the war is ended...
...There was the amusing "unite...
...Finally, the antagonism between the Mikhailovitch group and the Partisans reached such a pitch of intensity that these two force...
...This sort of thing is always cropping up in reviews in American papers...
...The Marines learned the game in a hurry...
...In this case a regrettable error crept in...
...As far as my own review is concerned, may I repeat that I consider On Native Grounds an extremely valuable contribution to the history of American literature and culture (although, as I have indicated, I have many disagreements...
...The first organizer of guerrilla warfare against the Germans and Italians was General Draja Mikhailovitch, who was an official representative of the Yugoslav Government-in-exile in London...
...Slovenes and other racial minorities...
...16 because I had read the book and was profoundly disappointed with its tone of bland superiority...
...But his negative recommendations were accepted...
...But I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that it was read by every other French officer...
...The Supreme Court of the United States by unanimous ruling January 18 upheld the conviction of the American Medical Association and the District of Columbia Medical Society for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Law in its conspiracy in attempt to destroy Group Health Association...
...Books were crossed off the list by one reactionary Board member who, fortunately, has since been induced to resign...
...Thus it took an elaborate report by the City's Department of Investigation to inform the humble citizen that our school libraries have for some years been subjected to an Obscure but effective censorship...
...In the report of Commissioner Herlands into the purchase of school supplies this tale of censorship is given as an example, of irregularity, of inefficiency, of waste, of messiness in the school system...
...I forward you the clipping: "The name of H. G. Wells, who died yesterday afternoon of heart failure in the Paddington infirmary at the age of 97, will have few associations for the younger generation...
...Once they learned the game, you can't take away from them that cocky feeling that Americans can do anything better than anyone else...
...What is urgently called for now is an understanding with with Russia, a clear enunciation by the Yugoslav Government of a broad-based federal program of future organization of the country and pressure on the various guerrilla forces in Yugoslavia to achieve operative unity a_nd to fire all their bullets at the Axis...
...We discover that things have been going on right here which we have the habit of associating with backward mountain regions or far sections of the unenlightened hinterland...
...The long identification of General Charles de Gaulie with Great Britain paved the way for some Anglo-American friction and misunderstanding over the organization of administratioB in North Africa, leading up to the recent denial by Mi...
...One cannot imagine an actual fighter taking more than a languid interest in their essays...
...Two important factors in the situation which impatient critics have not always taken into full consideration are the peculiar colonial character of Algeria and Morocco and the necessarily unrepresentative character of the French emigration with which the United Nations must deal...
...There are several lessons that seem to emerge from the French and African experience...
...Dabney "utterly collapsed...
...Another difficulty that arises in connection with the recognition of any French political grouping is that the French emigration, like every political emigration, is ne'cessarily unrepresentative...
...THE S.D.F...
...The Post Office lists 27 statements which it considers objectionable...
...The most interesting thing about Wei is was his refusal to accept the social inferiority to which he seemed to have been bom...
...In a case of this sort, the first action in this war where the government has moved against a left-wing publication, the procedure is highly unwise...
...Several of the statements listed are paraphrases of reports issued by government committees...
...I am grateful to Mr...
...Recently some distinguished books and authors have been stricken from this list Here are a few of the writers whose works are considered improper for the hands and minds of our young people: Hendrik Willem Van Loon, Charles and Mary Beard, Salwyn Shapiro, Harold O. Rugg, Benjamin G. Gruenberg, Stuart Chase and Roger Baldwin...
...UfHEN a country suffers the disaster of foreign ™ conquest, the people who get away are not a fair cross-section of the population...
...We, think the Post Office's action extremely unwise on three counts...
...was to drive the Axis forces out of Africa...
...Generally speaking, it is the higher military officers, the prominent politicians and publicists, the men and women who possess friends and influence i» other countries and facilities for making their escape who are able to go abroad...
...Adamic tells us...
...I shall write a book, ,a real book.'" Nottinghill, England...
...Question arising out of the war and out of the situations which must be faced after the war will be thouroughly debated...
...Fra nee itself, until the tragedy of 1940...
...He was indeed one of the most prolific of the 'literary hacks' of that time...
...The most disturbing feature of the situation is the way in which this thing happened...
...1. A hearing in which the Post Office is at the same time prosecutor and judge and jury is not the way to handle such a serious charge...
...This character was accentuated still further because the Vichy regime paid a good deal of attention to North Africa and filled up the administration with many of its trusted satellites...
...Mikhailovitch is a Serb and some members of the exiled Yugoslav Government are suspected of cherishing the Great Serbia ultra-centralisi tendency that has proved so distasteful in the past to Croats...
...The members of The New Leader staff join in wishing the delegates and visitors to this conference a happy and successful gathering...
...L'Action Francaise," the royalist organ of Charles Maurras...
...Medical Co-ops Win Victory Over A.M.A...
...I wish your reviewer, however, would explain to me how a writer, like Stephen Crane, who was born in 1870, . could "anticipate" a writer like Henry Beyle ("Stendahl") who died in 1842...
...In several other cases we think the Post Office has been misled by the traditional rhetoric and bombast which dots the speeches and writings of most of the sectarian radical groups...
...There should be full and free interchange of views and criticisms between the United States and Great Britain...
...William McFep is certainly right when he says that Stephen Crane who was born in 1870 could have not anticipated a writer like Stendahl...
...But the systematic pumping up of hate by professional writers who .will never by any chance get near the firing-line is -quite another matter...
...Later another anti-Axis movement got under way that was independent of Mikhailovitch and that has even proved hostile to him...
...But if one piece of skulduggery like this can go on for years, one wonders what other activities of the same sort may from time to time escape the scrutiny of higher^ps...
...This man had no qualifications for such a task and no authority to undertake it...
...There have been similar cas;s, one may note, in China...
...The psychology of these fighting men emerges clearly from the colonel's picture...
...That this policy had its distasteful sides, and involved dealing with individuals who were far from enthusiastic for the four freedoms is undeniable...
...Note] the paragraphs where I wrote of Kazin's rediscovery of William Dean Howells which would have made my appreciation of the book even more explicit...
...Praise for Bell From HILBERT BLACK To the Editor: I enclose two dollars for a subscription to your worthy and intelligent paper...
...Brendan Bracken, British Minister of Informal ion...
...Alfred Kazin or myself that he accuses of a "tone of bland superiority...
...The Board of Education knew nothing about it...
...From LEON DENNEN To the Editor: 1 am not quite sure with whom Mr...
...was not very widely read by the average Frenchman...
...We think we are civilized, intelligent, progressive...
...and it would scarcely have facilitated this objective to have precipitated a civil war with the local French administration...
...NowFrench North Africa, as a colonial country, had very few French workers and a disproportionately large number of army officers and civil administrators- with the strongly conservative views that officials in colonial countries usually develop...
...Philadelphia...
...It must be recognized, however, that North Africa simply did not possess those mass democratic forces that will be found in France itself...
...LETTERS TO THE EDITOR William McFee Raises Issue on Kazin Review, Dennen Replies From WILLIAM McFEE To the Editor: I read the review of On Native Grounds, by Alfred Kazin, in your issue of Jan...
...were fighting each other almost as much as they fought the Axis...
...Justice Roberts, who wrote the opinion, refused to hold the medical societies immune from prosecution and w-aived aside their appeal for consideration under the Clayton and NorrisLaGuardia acts, declaring, "They (the doctors) were interested in the terms and conditions of the employment only in the sense that they desired to prevent Group Health from functioning by having any employees...
...In this case it reveals a total lack of familiarity with literary perspective...
...But that is not why they win...
...We cannot hope to excel them in this dtpartr ment...
...They cannot possibly be serving a practical military purpose...
...In addition to this self-appointed censor, there was a clerk in the correspondence and mailing division...
...The New Leader's concern is not aroused primarily because nearly all of these authors are more or less regular contributors to this paper...
...They are not extremists, sectarians, queer people...
...They are good scientists, clear thinkers, good writers...
...The whole thing was engineered underground by a single member of the Board and underlings in the offices of the system...
...was generally kept a little left of center by the votes of its workers, of some of its peasants and of the more liberal part of its middle class...
...But now and then we get a shock...
...And French military officers as a class, as I can testify from personal experience, are not representative af thr political sentiments of the French people...
...There should be, if possible, clear understanding with Russia as to just how far the Soviet sphere of political influence is to extend after the war...
...Naturally they hate the enemy...
...The fact that it is cooperative and procures services and facilities on behalf of its members only does not remove its activities from the sphere of business," Justice Roberts declared...
...We must, after all, build a world on whatever of emotions and ideas prevail when the last bomb has been dropped...
...The American Civil Liberties Union is battling against the revocation of the mailing privilege...
...The tragic situation in Yugoslavia has been eloquently described by Louis Adamic in a magazine article which pieces together the fragmentary bits of information that have been coming out of that tortured country...
...They do just the sort of vigorous intellectual work that would interest youngs people in basic problems and inspire them in the direction of good citizenship...
...Some day,' he would be heard to say...
...He was seriously injured in a brawl with some Fascist roughs brought about by a rare fit of indignation on his part in 1948, and his health was further impaired by a spell in a concentration camp under the brief Communist dictatorship of 1952...
...In both these countries there is an alarming tendency, partly, no doubt, unconscious, for a cockpit of struggle between individual members of the United Nations coalition to grow up side by side with the struggle against the Axis...
...Wells is now 76, and I thought some of your readers might be interested in a few of his remarks...
...He was a liberal democrat in the sense that he claimed an unlimited right to think, criticize, discuss and suggest, and he was a socialist in his antagonism to personal, racial or national monopolization...
...McFee is "disappointed," and whether it is Mr...
...The lieutenant who was assigned to escort foreign correspondents on visits to the front, a highschool teacher of Greek and Latin in civilian life, was a passionate royalist who frankly hated everything that stemmed from the French Revolution...
...They win because they are good...
...To, make a brutal statement, Crane had nothing whatever to do with Stendahl and the allusion was simply dragged in to impress illiterates...
...It is unfortunate that you had to omit [for technical reasons—Ed...
...The American Civil Liberties Union which once held a completely arbitrary view of regarding any infringement on civil liberties as an issue to be fought, has backtracked in this war to state that it would not , defend men or papers suspected of having traffic with the enemy, and that the clear and present danger principle, hazy as it is, should be a guiding measure...
...The decision followed a fouryear battle to establish the right of cooperative health associations to operate without interference from the organized medical profession which had attempted to destroy the Group Health Cooperative in its early days of operation...
...He occupied an old tumbledown house upon the borders of Regents Park and his bent, shabby, slovenly and, latterly, somewhat obese figure was frequently to be seen in the adjacent gardens...
...Defends Role Of Dabney From JACOB BILLIKOPF To the Editor: In a recent article in The New Leader, Mr...
...CENSORSHIP IN NEW YORK U7E New Yorkers are usually rather proud " of our town...
...1U0RTH AFRICA, after furnishing justified cause for military jubilation, has produced some severe political headaches, both in this country and in England...
...One would much rather risk rebuilding on the content of the minds there on Guadalcanal than on what seems to be in some heads bent over typewriters here at home...
...His immediate needs were relieved by a small Civil-List pension in 1955...
...There should be no mortgaging of the future of the French people...
...It is doubtful if at any time in our modern world men have ever .been called upon to oppose an enemy who has done so much evil, who has sunk so low in the human scale...
...We think the government ought to reconsider its charges...
...I was merely paraphrasing Kazin's remark that "As a novelist of war Crane anticipated the war studies of the future...
...It will become charged with international explosive elements if the time should come, this year or next when the Axis military power would crumble and Yugoslavia would be simultaneously entered by Russian armies from the East and by Anglo-American forces from the Near East and the Mediterranean...
...French"in-exile has been largely military, whether represented by General de Gaulle in London or by General Giraud in North Africa...
...CONFERENCE A S this issue The New Leader comes off * * the press members of, the Social Democratic Federation from San Francisco to Boston'will be gathering in New York for a national conference...
...The decision which agreed with a prior decision by the Appellate Court declared, "The medical societies combined and conspired to prevent the successful operation of Group Health's plan, and the steps by which this was to be effectuated were as follows: (1) to impose restraints on physicians affiliated with Group Health by threat of expulsion or actual expulsion from the societies...
...Definite political problems which must be faced by Socialist and labor groups in the various states will also be taken up and lines of action with regard to them will be determined...
...They studied the Japs' tricks and copied them and then added a few of their own...
...Books for these libraries are, naturally, ordered in accordance with ag basic list for which the School Board is responsible...
...Here is a situation that is bad enough as it stands...
...McFee, whose opinion I value, for calling it to my attention...
...But somebody in the school system decreed that boys and girls are to be prevented from making contact with such minds...
...that Great Britain and the United States were backing opposed candidates in the French civil administration...
...The present situation in France and in North Africa is difficult and complex...
...I particularly like the lively book review section and the columns by Daniel Bell which supply an amazing amount of background information on vital social trends...
...His jo^, after all...
...H. G. Wells Writes His 'Obituary' From J. R. C. ROCKLEY To the Editor: Mr...
...They are well represented by Colonel LeRoy Hunt, of the Marines...
...3. The charge of violating the Espionage Act which prohibits willfully making or conveying false reports or statements with intent to interfere with the operation or successes of the armed forces, is a serious one...
...of course, not the first curious Communist coalition...
...in some cases turned on the Partisans and killed and tortured them on the ground that their tactics were too reckless and only brought down Axis punitive expeditions that wiped out whole villages...
...THE POST OFFICE AND THE MILITANT AFTER holding up weekly issues of The ** Militant for many weeks, the Post Office has now moved to revoke completely the mail privileges of this Trotskyite paper on the ground that it has violated the Espionage Act...
...So I think it is unreasonable to blame General Eisenhower for not starting a social revolution in this singularly unpromising soil...
...Soldiers on duty are in a far different mood from these emotional artists...
...2. In matters involving the tenuous line as to where opinion borders on sedition, we think the wisest rule to follow is the dictum laid down by Justice Holmes of "the clear and present danger...
...This curious association of the disciples of Lemh and Stalin with the conservative romantic bearer of the Cross of Lorraine (Churchill in a relaxed moment is said to have remarked that of all hkl crosses, the Cross of Lorraine was the hardest to bear) is...
...A. Philip Randolph described Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, as "one of the so-called white elements of the South" who, along with others, "utterly collapsed when there was a struggle to free Odell Waller...
...Thereafter his once considerable vitality seems to have deserted him...
...The Chairman of the Board was horrified when he discovered it...
...H. G. Wells has recently offered the public a new item on "Things -to come"—his autoobituary...
...he had no palpable debt to Stendahl or Tolstoy," etc...
...No one can be expected to love men who have done to the world what these enemies of ours have done...
...Returned from the fighting in Guadalcanal, he said the other day: "The young American is the best potential soldier in the world because he's so intelligent...
...Yours truly, William McFee...
...All of the basic political and economic problems of our fast-moving - world will be on the agenda of the sessions...
...Dabney, may I state that he signed a petition to the Governor of Virginia urging him to commute the Waller sentence to life imprisonment, and was vigorously denounced all over the state for doing so...
...By William Henry Chamberlin Where the News Ends New Seeds of War and Revolution IS the second World War bearing the seeds of * the third...
...No one need have any fear that our American troops will be too soft and easy on the foe...
...But recent developments in Yugoslavia and in North Africa pose this question with inexorable urgency...
...front" here with Father Divine, who modestly described himself as "god...
...2) to deny them the essential professional contacts with other physicians, and (3) to use the coercive power of the societies to deprive them of hospital facilities for their patients...
...Unfortunately part of the sentence fell out...
Vol. 26 • January 1943 • No. 4
