The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
A Page of Features Americana Books and Writers Chatter The Home Front By WILLIAM E. BOHN Lekerson's Warning to Labor WILLIAM M. LEISERSON is no outsider. As one of John R. f» Commons' men at...
...But you've got to care...
...it cannot be lightly dismissed...
...vivacious rather than pretty, and possessed of an almost terrifying charm and poise...
...Russell's only other volume is Berlin Embassy, that lively picture of Germany published in 1941...
...And as such it serves a real purpose, for the record reveals the full responsibility of those who helped make Hitler, who prepared for him the road to Fascist conquest—the Army, sections of the...
...Louis, does well, marries a white girl and, when the hero is down-and-out, is the only one reach a helping hand to him...
...But his mother spoke to him, and told him to make good as a Jew...
...Czechoslovakia, and Poland) infco the Legion, and the well-padded outfit is now training out in Atterbury, Indiana, with "Archdukes" Felix and Carl Ludwig shuffling along with the others...
...But IP he points without apology to increasing autocracy within the unions as a sign of the times...
...The New Leader invites answer—from trade union members as well as from officials...
...And if an artist can Wort only in so far as he holds the mistaken belief that his work is creative, bow wiD Mr...
...and some American house oupht to pat it oat here...
...Robert knows there will be a lynching, for marrying across the color line is the unforgivable sin...
...The "Wald-viertel," the mountain stretches in Austria where anti-Semitism had its home for many decades...
...What an historic drama that would have made...
...the best tunes of all have already gone to Carnegie Hall...
...I;wish I could prescribe to the whole population—and I would W>t exclude the North—a reading of South Today...
...In India, you see...
...Post-Script "To bring back France...
...Louis...
...You couldn't possible let 29 straggle into an armycamp for training, so the War Department shipped in several hundred draftees (former nationals of Austria...
...Backed up by old Judge Peyton, they represent the traditional down-at-heel, reactionary, anti-Negro psychological set of an entire region...
...Newton...
...Trade unionism is as old in America as anywhere else in the world...
...Even in the great city he finds "there is no difference any place...
...Chiang Kai-shek story...
...A Biography...
...Robert Cain vs...
...Jim, goes to St...
...Leiserson's own words: "The political influence of business and industry correspondingly weakened, and to a large extent the position in the councils of Government formerly held by business leaders is now occupied by labor leaders...
...And the picture that this man gets from thousands of-actual contacts he sees in historical perspectives...
...It is more because it is not only a biography but a valuable historical record of the period, on the whole as reliable as can be expected...
...Are these developments wartime pains...
...To account ler the creative activity of artists by the style to which they contribute, is like accounting for a man's character by the fish, flesh or fowl that he eats and digests, for a cfty's buildings by its skyline, for a man's fife by his grave...
...owner of the program, the Blue Network fathered the idea of having FDR make his address at 10:30 p. m...
...There is no longer genuine collective bargaining...
...Whether you like the story or not...
...Harris, though far from rejecting tradition, suggests that the composer is an individuality in his own right, and that his creation can be news in music...
...Now that Selden Rodman is in the Army...
...Dorothy Thompson did too—but in a coluVnn this week confessed that if she endorsed Luce she did not endorse Pan-American Airways whose Vice-President Sam Preyer was Miss Luce's campaign manager and GOP National Committee chaiman from Connecticut...
...It is edited and published by Lillian E. Smith and Paula Snelling at Clayton, Georgia...
...I t's a brilliant, useful job...
...Without this weapon Sam Gompers could never have been the upstanding, independent fellow he was...
...Mike, from boyhood, was crazy about flying...
...The Past of der Fuhrer By TONY SENDER HITLER, MAN OF STRllfe...
...Control by union membership is too slow for these swift-moving times...
...He contends that the idea that any individual artist really has any personal part in what he does is the artist's "greatest and most necessary illusion...
...This boy...
...The book is more and also less than its title promises...
...Although sections of British public opinion are hot so worried about the problem of India as they were a year ago when the War was going badly, most leading newspapers have called for Gandhi's liberation...
...But Mike couldn't get a job...
...All right, you don't care...
...i^NE part of the answer will instantly occur to anyone...
...He is a man of strong feelings which push him on in a persistent quest for a musical language to express them with, and he may find himself breaking with tradition as well as accepting it...
...By Ludwig Wagner...
...True, if any artist loses this illusion, he stops artisting...
...But what about s^fcmple of other questions...
...Carpenter declares, an effect pointing back to causes, and if the artist's idea that he creates is a necessary cause of the effect, then if the effect is real, the cause must be real also, and creation is not illusion...
...Maybe there is no way of stopping the tide, but there are ways of stemming the air-wavtn...
...Before that date— nearly always—Big Business dominated the federal government sad the unions fought the combination...
...Anderson, Harris and Carpenter...
...Essay* fry Maxwell Anderson, Rhys Carpenter, Roy Warm...
...Before .that the union—typified by the single-purposed, hard-fighting Samuel Gompers—stood on its own feet and fought the world...
...Out of the Deep South By WILLIAM E. BOHN ' ROBERT CAIN...
...it is said, i? going to do a book on "The Influence of She Power in History...
...He is already master of his form, and-we can count on his winning for himself a standing among the best writers of the new South...
...He quotes chapter and verse...
...Listen, listen...
...LEISERSON is trying to make no case against Labor...
...If any reader will give me the slightest nudge of encouragement, I will "reprint here a list of...
...Knut Hamsun, celebrated Norwegian novelist, is still doing Quisling work...
...Nathalia Crane, once known as the Wonder-poet of America (at the ago of 11), is an inspector for the Sperry Gyroscope...
...Revolutionary" con-mvings to control the unions were more disturbing during the heyday of DeLeon...
...The only decent, intelligent, hopeful character in the entire book is a mulatto boy...
...the "V stands only for Viceroy...
...Leiserson closes his article with the question: "Are these developments growing pains...
...The War Labor Board takes care of all of that...
...heard anybody comment or her pe*-fume...
...With the ending of the war the situation will be fundamentally changed...
...Meanwhile in New York Otto is going1 ahead with his schemes and maneuvers...
...It is too carefully thought out, too close-knit, too definitely wrought...
...Robert Cain is the tale of the capitulation of a self-conscious, impotent and uncertainly rebellious hero to the tough behavior patterns of the old slave and cotton country...
...With this power go responsibilities and dangers...
...The whole thing is in a tight sociological frame, a completely created and animated "World You may argue about whether this world is a part of the real South...
...He reminds one of Spengler...
...boys over at Information Please are still having a bad time of it (even though, thank God...
...He does not see the thing in the making, he sees what is left when the maker has passed beyond, to something else...
...3) racketeering...
...Fearing Congress is tantamount to fearing the people...
...Wagner's biography does not offer many new fects and is especially scanty on Hitler's later year...
...It was in all the papers...
...This is, of course, hardly all the author's fault...
...Billinger...
...But there is nothing tentative or half-baked.-Or uncertain about his workmanship...
...Gandhi continues his fast, and the Viceroy, the hard-headed Marquess of Linlithgow, remains adamant But the story is told of hew once when Gandh...
...John Milton couldnt help making a bene of Satan, the Prince of Evil himself...
...This is surely profoundly true today...
...he cries desperately, "do you think the niggers won't hate you...
...At any rate, some one...
...Today everybody is ah "outsider" to the master's bourg in Berchtesgaden...
...I don't think that their generalizations help us to see where as artist actually stands, what he does or how he does it, when be is cresting...
...The successful playwright is, whether he knows it or not, a priest, the rule of whose craft is to construct a plot in which this warfare takes place in an exciting way, between characters that bravely fight for the faith that is in them, impersonated Try actors 'who themselves satisfy the community standards, physical and moral...
...The grounds for his concern Mr...
...As Wagner says, Hitler's great weakness is that he never learns what he does net wont to know...
...Ludwig Wagner solves the riddle...
...The Sews Chronicle asked Churchill to free him "as an act of high moral courage at a time when the world's standards of morality are at a very low ebb...
...It is a hrst novel, but not a first book for Mr...
...She speaks excellent English, with an intonation which faintly ••»•< alls her American college-training And strangely enough, wc have neve...
...AFL and CIO have already stepped in to see that the Rickenbacker anti-Labor slant stays out of movie propaganda...
...By William Russell...
...it is said that she sometimes signs death-warrants with her own hand...
...Might be a nice story...
...They are in an entirely differ-K- tot position from that of their predecessors in 1910 or 1880...
...to reviewer Karl Billinger BiTlinger, of course, was incensed by the anti-Communist sections of the account, and made some hopelessly stupid remarks about how the authors hit the Communist in order to become "respectable...
...It is probably still too early to expect such an achievement from anyone...
...Hew can it be explained...
...The South, these women say, is trying to buy a new world for 5>ld Confederate bills...
...The morale of the camp, we learn, is pretty near zero...
...the president of a mothers' union: or the simple, affectionate, clinging Chinese wife...
...Derhapsburc —When Hank Stimson started an Austrian Legion t for the U. S. Army with Otto Hapsburg as chief recruiter—we put a big nuiybe on the story...
...His current appeals have been for the cessation of anti-Nazi sabotage...
...Harris doesn't show us how or why he chooses to develop one theme and not another, in this pattern and not another...
...Sir Reginald Tottenham, has never in 30 years met Gandhi...
...Eliot has just edited u volume of James Joyce's writings for a British publisher...
...WILLIAM RUSSELL gives us a new and signifi-" cant picture of the deep South, the deepest, the Delta Country of Mississippi...
...It feared not Pinkerton "detectives," federal troops, state militia or all the lies of a prejudiced press...
...His model planes won prises He attended a leading trade school, and his record there was one of the most brilliant in its history...
...You can get a single issue for 50c and the four numbers Which are published each year for $1.00...
...And, by the way, among the contributors to-'fke New Masses this week was Senator Warren Austin of rock-ribbed Vermont...
...You've probably heard them all— what she told Congress, how she cracker...
...W. W. Norton...
...Staff Sergeant Meyer Levin of Brooklyn, ace bombardier who sank the Jap battleship Haruna on Colin Kelly's fatal flight, who miraculously got out from under two flaming planes—was killed in action some* where in the Pacific...
...But every day the mailman continues to bring books to Hamsun's house—the people all over Norway sending back his own once-loved novels...
...Lobar as the Utile Brother THE basis of the author's fears is Labor's changed position since 1986...
...This is the first time the Home Front has gone all-out for blatant advertising of this sort...
...In it a playwright, a composer and a classical archaglogist recite their beliefs about the bases of artistic creation...
...ex-Natiov editor) has stepped into the office over at Common Seme magazine . . . Books I lose no sleep waiting for: the forthcoming biography of—Quentin—Reynolds...
...What sort of modern coin to put in circulation they telLJn patient detail...
...Labor's dependence on the executive departments and its distrust of Congress is another...
...Throughout more than a century it has developed its policies and tactics...
...Anderson doesn't show us what, at any time is good, and what is evil: to those who are unfriendly to Sacco and Vanzetti, his Gods of the Lightning and Winterset are a vindication of evil...
...His humanity is however more physiologic and less psychological, more individual and less social...
...Monday...
...If a work of art is, as Mr...
...According to Dan Golenpaul...
...The old, irrational fear of a slave uprising again grips large sections of the white community...
...But in reality—that is, in the eyes of a classical archaeologist like Mr...
...Irresistibly Jim, too, is drawn back to the town dominated by the dirty squatters before the old drug store...
...A style is something "ordered, measured and inexorable," a "biological process with a teleological trend," an evolutionary cycle which takes about 590 years to complete itself...
...twenty "simple, Undramatic things" we all can do to ease the strains of race •ntagonism...
...3.50...
...The letters of warning and protest were written to Wendell Willkie, who is with 29th Century Fox...
...So we'll fill j*-by passing on to you the nice profile of the Gissimo's wife penned by W. H. Auden and Chris Isherwood in their travels through China: "She is a small, round-faced lady, exquisitely dressed...
...The town has conquered, the bank has conquered, the old, old pattern has conquered...
...Hollywood is going ahead with the plane far a flm story of Eddie Rickenbacker...
...T.S...
...Rhys Carpenter, will have nothing of the individual and his disposition in artistic creation...
...The struggle is between a boy and a town...
...which Hitler grew up...
...Rhys Carpenter;—he is a servant and a vehicle of a style...
...No sense being caught asleep at the switch...
...You've got to know what the niggers are thinking, you've got to know what they talk about in the night in their cabins...
...Finally, early in 1938, Mike Levin crashed into the flying game—as an Army Air Corp* private . . and finally early in 1943 he crashed out...
...Viewing the present situation as a link between the past and the future, this man—at once the sincere scholar and the man of action—is troubled about what he sees on the horizon for American labor...
...This change is natural, but it is also dangerous...
...That book an Germany) Mn#ter Plan (torn apart by Dan Bell on this page last week) is (retting- an awful lot of pushing and plugging in the press and the publisher's world...
...Leiserson set down recently in an article published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science...
...Maxwell Anderson is the playwright summing up his experience with the stage...
...someone has said, and printed in the times a letter to the dead...
...It is the most delicious either of us has ever smelt...
...Since then his wide and varied experiences— with trade unions, with employers, with arbitration proceedings, with the War Labor Board—have given an intimate view of the inside workings...
...Right now the trade union movement is bedeviled by three troubles: (1) dual unionism...
...These three forms of pestilence Mr...
...In the Delta country, they say, more whites than Negroes are taken, •way by the war...
...Luce in the last election...
...Labor may seek "to maintain its unity by protecting its precious achievements and by vigilantly seeking to insure the same freedom and equality of opportunity to all other elements in the population...
...Bat since 1935 all of this hus changed...
...Lord Halifax, then Viceroy, wanted to start a counter-fast...
...Jottings: Luther Conant.-ex-P.lf reporter, is now with the OWI...
...There is probably no one in this country who knows more about.what is happening inside our unions, inside government bodies which deal with union's and in all the complicated moves and counter-moves which go on between the two sets of onganjzations...
...Wagner, an Austrian and once a member of the Austrian Socialist movement, knows the atmosphere in...
...The latter looks backward, upon a series of finished" works...
...Danger signals this friend of thi labor movement sees aplenty John L. Lewis giving $500,000.00 tcj the New Deal war chest and then switching over to the Republicans is one of them...
...You may even know that his father was a good union man...
...Obviously, she knows just how to deal with any conceivable type of visitor...
...The unheroic hero escapes for a time to St...
...The author sees in both town and city gigantic, repetitive organisms...
...where Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was dying, a dark sense of tragedy was engulfing India...
...Pootnote to a Hero:—It was in all the papers...
...He describes, what he repeats as "the onry religibn I have...
...Union contracts increasingly provide officials with dictatorial powers...
...fOf all things...
...the inspector of hospitals...
...In the meantime the old weapons of independent action are decaying from want of ,use...
...Frances Xctne...
...2) Communism...
...The President was to go on earlier, but Blue (Golenpaul charges) wanted to cut Information Please off he air over at NBC...
...The main point of it is that since 1935 the unions have become dependent on the executive departments of the federal government and that this dependence places their future power and influence in jeopardy...
...The moratorium on the use of it is an inevitable feature of Labor's interest in the outcome of the war...
...For it will take new doing, and the green thrust of youth, the bread of hope, an echo of the truth...
...Charm Kai-shek:—When she's in town, a paragrapher *** hasn't got a Chinaman's chance of getting anything but the Mme...
...It increases, for example, the peril from racketeers...
...Racketeering is more dangerous now merely because the failure of the unions to deal with it threatens to bring Congress and the state legislatures into the field with cures which are worse than the disease...
...In its independence and daring it was as typically American as the fiontier settlers or the robber barons...
...331 pp...
...There is no rancor, and there is <kep understanding...
...One hits the Commies...
...that very fine book on the anti-Fascist and Socialist underground by Weyl ? Jannsen...
...How to dig in and defend its members it has learned through long experience...
...Leiserson or anyone else worth taking into account Would argue against it...
...back at the President, and all the rest...
...Austin is the author of the manpower-conscription bill which all Labor has bean vigorously fighting...
...A lot of nice, weD-meaiiing liberal people are being embarassed by Claire Luce...
...On some issues they need their combined power against Big Business...
...T'HE fact that an upstart group of such char-* acter and caliber as the fascist and the Nazi /could keep the center of the world's stage for a time, is a tremendous challenge to contemporaries...
...Dual unionism was more pernicious in the days of the Knights of Labor...
...He sees the skyline of a city, but not the activity of building which composed it...
...She can become at will the cultivated, westernized woman with a knowledge of literature and art: the technical expert, discussing aeroplane-engines and machine-guns...
...Well, it now leaks out that Otto-boy managed to buttonhole exactly 29 volunteers...
...ftfiM...
...New Brunswick, 1*42...
...hit out at Claire'« "globaloney" si icing* —but the Post supported Mrs...
...In painting, our own "style" began with Daccio and is ending now...
...He was advised to change his name...
...In Newton public opinion is symbolized by a row of dirty old codgers (white under the dirt) squatting on their hauches before the old drug store, trying to outdistance one another in squirting tobacco juice and discussing the laziness of their "niggers...
...So Robert, Robert the scared...
...And what preparations are the unions making to cure them, rise above them, abolish them the minute the war is over...
...because success obtained any other way wouldn't be worth it...
...Roy Harris, the composer, puts the base of musical creation in "humanity itself...
...Leiserson does not dismiss lightly...
...But his advisers talked him out of it...
...If some people abroad, and among them some statesmen of the democracies, begin to pin their hope for the post-Hitler Germany on the representations of these gfodpT,"the knowledge of the responsibility of those same 'men may help to oppose such dangerous and shortsighted projects...
...But irresistible cords draw him back to face his destiny...
...The answer is No...
...So Messrs...
...and is headed west...
...Reinhold Niebuhr is going to England...
...G. P. Putnam's Sons...
...Georg von Schoenerer, the Austrian preacher of race hatred in Bismarck's time, is correctly presented as the teacher' of the "Leader" of the Third Reich...
...On the final page the young man, who was always scared and always dreamed of safety, follows a pretty colored girl down the street and tarns in where the loafers are playing poker...
...The book is lively and well written...
...A part of the difficulty, then, is temporary and inescapable...
...The N. Y. Post editor, for one...
...a veteran member of New York's Amalgamated...
...e * Across the Seas:—The RAF in the raids over Germany last month happened to demolish the Diisseldorf home oi Franz von Papen...
...If Gandhi dies in fietention, India will never forgive us...
...But once you have entered and breathed Its air you cannot turn back and you cannot forget...
...Second-ranking Britisher...
...That was in some of the stories...
...Through the walls of all the houses he sees all the tiny people doing the same things, thinking the same thoughts, automatically insisting on the same standards...
...not with these soiled hands i> the parish blest...
...Inside and Out By MATTHEW LOW TPhat fall-page ad which you saw in the Times this week—re-* printing the text of a recent Earl Browder speech—was also in 16 other leading dailies throughout the country It set the Commies back some $20,000 for a one-day throw-away...
...or it may engage in partisan politics, seek to feed on its own power and to dictate to the people of the country, including its own members...
...nor from these sour grapes is the s»e*t wine pressed, net with these sulphur stains are the towers gilded...
...Rhys Carpen*er's calvfnism of styles account for the power of his "necessary illusion...
...There are many reasons t» believe that if there is illusion, the illusion is not the creative artist's but the onlooking critic's...
...Those Old Confederate Bills pVERY now and then some southerner walks into The New ** Leader office and tells us that things are bad down yonder...
...They must adapt themselves quickly to changed situations...
...To use Mr...
...not for "rrs;>ecf"— but for elementary working class and Socialist seli-resperi...
...item by item...
...Anderson calls upon the playwright to repeat what his public already knows and feels: his plays, like the rituals of religion, must hring no news...
...I iterati & Co.:—Things we didn't like—The Sut urn's giving The Silent Way...
...During the Roosevelt administration Labor and the government teamed up...
...Art and the Artist By HORACE M. KALLEN THE BASES OF ARTISTIC CREATION...
...He repeats a great many old things and some things not so old, but pone that will not bear repeating...
...It has been a part of our life from the very start...
...It is a useful book and one worth reading...
...Mississippi—and Newton wins...
...Latest turn was a secret meeting in which Benes of Czechoslovakia was put down on the list among the enemies of the Hapsburg Empire...
...2.50...
...Jimmy Cannon...
...This article was picked up and given wider circulation by the United States News of David Lawrence...
...We would like to know just who is so crazy about the idea of completely eliminating all German industry...
...The non-strike pledge robs labor of its traditional weapon...
...And out from Poona...
...As one of John R. f» Commons' men at the University of Wisconsin, he started with a.labor point of view...
...But what wasn't in the papers was an angle that gives new depth and meaning to the Levin story...
...e » Whof Is Labor's Answer...
...A new style is shaping which will convey "a painter's emotional outlook on his world, becoming its master, and not as today, its slave...
...Robert under the weight of his inferiority complex rises for one bright moment to face the mob...
...Clifton Fadimah...
...The, tendency grows in both A. F. of L. and CIO...
...THE other month Rutgers University celebrated its ope hundred and seventy-fifth birthday...
...Nobody so far has offered a satisfactory account, nor can it now be said that Mr...
...Its faculty, alumni and trustees made a considerable academic holiday of the event and proposed to perpetuate the holiday fti a series of publications of which this book is Number One...
...It is free from sensationalism, and makes a serious attempt at psychological analysis...
...She could be terrible, she could be gracious, she could be business-like, she could be ™thless...
...The archaeologist, Mr...
...But he explains—and with complete justification—that there is nothing new about them...
...PM columnist, has been transferred out of Fort Dix...
...The first section of this analysis parallels that made by Max Zaritsky in his recent Saturday Evening Post article...
...Sgt...
...Richard Rovere («a-New Masses...
...Rutgers University Press...
...A theatrical performance is like Holy Mass "a communal religious service" which sets forth in the language and according to the conventions of the generation, the perennial warfare between good and evil, and the final vindication and victory of what is good...
...However, what can be done and what Ludwig Wagner as a matter of fact is assisting is,the compilation of all available elements- for generations to come in order to enable them to obtain a comprehensive picture of this modern counter-revolution...
...In this tense atmosphere terrible things may happen...
...The aviation field was closed to him...
...Depending on me executive is like placing all one's eggs in a single basket which nay be smashed at the next election...
...He sees the ordered stones of the graveyard, but not the once-lfvrng forms they now testify to...
...No blame is spilled in ihe direction of trade union officials...
...Not from these ashes is a city rebuilded...
...Neither Mr...
...started bis-fast...
...The word, too, might have gotten around that Mike for many years was an active socialist in the youth groups...
...aristocracy and Big-Business...
...But if any reader is bowled over by my sales talk, he will thank me...
...Robert the impotent...
...And far away in New Delhi there was unconcern in the British Raj palace...
...You might call it the reverence of the audience, meaning by the audience not merely the individuals who pay to go to the theatre, but their common hopes and fears, their standards of one another and their ways with one another...
...tie Pegler or Rickenbacker t|S...
...Like big business in the days when it had things its own way, the trade unionists now want no new legislation...
...Anderson says that even such plays as Tobacco Road and Rain meet these conditions, and that Hitler must figure as evil-to-be-overcome, even in Germany...
Vol. 26 • February 1943 • No. 9
