A NOVEL ABOUT BOSSES
Siler, Ruth
A Novel About Reviewed by RUTH SILER SHADOW OF A HERO. By Allan Chase. Little Brown * Co., Boston, W49. 1317 pp. $3.00. « tT If ALMOST HALF A CENTURY now since Lincoln StefTens and...
...Less defl[nitely now, in the guise of fiction, he I is reminding each of us that we must 'look out for this democracy which we | claim to be guarding for all the world...
...That is the story Allan Chase tells us by way of his novel...
...second, how to check and counter the enormous amount of nutritional miseducation put out by the food advertisers and salesmen...
...Then a child is kidnaped...
...He had been born and raised in it but left it as a young man and returned after the war only because he remembered it as a pleasant, happy place...
...Successful magazine editors have been those who printed what they liked themselves and were fortunate enough to have tastes that corresponded to those of their readers...
...Both often went out of their way to insult writers of letters-to-theeditor, advertisers, and other sacred cows...
...These advanced primitives utilize euthanasia, a rigorous method of child-spacing, and an effective inter-island share-thewealth scheme, all of which have much to do with the public health, and none of which gets any ^attention in this symposium...
...These gains are not general, however, and even •/here they were achieved- they were not always permanent...
...For ten years or so it has had an honest administration...
...Most of these papers are excellent, yet at the end of the volume one realizes that the subject has remained fragmented, its total context unstated, its most critical problems unformulated...
...SYMPOSIA ARE ALMOST NEVER REALLY BOOKS...
...5.00...
...they also\ake—or used to take, before the missionaries got to them—a practical view of cannibalism which as Dean Swift pointed out long ago, has much to recommend it as a means of relating population to subsistence resources...
...332 pages...
...Kelleher's will reveals that he has left a sum of money to the city for the building of a sports stadium...
...Notably good are the papers contributed by Alice Hamilton on the poisonous trades, by Louis I. Dublin on Public Health and the Diseases of Old Age, and by Abel Wolman on the Engineer in Public Health...
...236 pp...
...Like his subject, Mr...
...a little gauntly, one wonders if they know...
...Similarly, this symposium lacks an adequate generalizer who would perform for public health in the world today that same kind of eco-cultural analysis that Laura Thompson in a recent pathbreaking article did for the Fijian island of Lau...
...The following day his house is blown up and all that is found in the debris, are his false teeth and a piece of cloth from one of his suits...
...In contrast, one notes the gentle unworldliness of Charles Glenn King, Scientific Director of The Nutrition Foundation, who manages to write about Nutrition Research in its Relation to Public Health without mentioning the two most critical problems in the field which are: first, how to fight off commercial pressure groups and give our food scientists an independent stance in our society with sufficient authority to make food policy...
...It is...
...He was chief editor of Time in its early years, and was directly or indirectly responsible for most of its innovations and editorial practices—the compartmentalization of news, the concise reporting, the scrupulous attention to trivial but interesting details, the tongue-in-cheek approach to much of the news, the esoteric vocabulary, the insistence on reportorial anonymity...
...Horace Smith is a young writer living in New York...
...Therein lies the tragedy...
...He and Luce were able to borrow the money and launch the magazine when they were only 24 years old...
...An ex-alderman, Arnold Kelleher, acts as intermediary for the distraught parents and becomes a hero when he returns the child to them unharmed...
...The newspapers are fulsome in their praise and, led by Tod Mullen, the old political boss, the city mourns the passing of its'martyred hero...
...Each specialist does/ his stuff "admirably, but their reports do not add up to a living person—the patient...
...Farrar, Straus...
...Steve is fairly new on the job and in the city...
...This is not a very profund or searching biography, but it makes superb reading...
...His message cannot be repeated often enough...
...Yet Hadden was certainly one of the great editors of our age...
...Steve escapes to Mexico with the wife he has acquired in the course of the story, and in the election that follows Tod Mullen rides back into power on the wave of enthusiasm generated by the phony hero's shadow...
...His city is large, middle-western, industrialized...
...Like Harold Ross of the New Yorker, another great editor, Hadden proved that an editor has to edit for himself, not for his readers...
...not unless they are interpreted by a first-rate diagnostician...
...or to lead the discussion in another symposium—a symposium on how to organize and run symposiums...
...He did it the first time in 1943 with Falange, his expose of Nazi activities in South America...
...at best they provide convenient end useful reference volumes, like the present one, which most health profesaionAls and journalists writing in the field of health will want to own...
...Briton Hadden, co-founder with Henry Luce ot Time magazine, was the sort of man that a good many magazines would have been afraid to hire...
...Both Ross and Hadden made a point of never flattering their readers and never talking down to them...
...His approach to editing, as to most of his activities, was facetious...
...Public Health Capsule tevfewed fty JAM'S ROffTT PUBLIC HEALTH IN THE WORLD TODAY...
...It contains 24 papers by as many eminent experts, who served as visiting lecturers at the Harvard School of Public Health...
...STEVE'S LONELY CRUSADE ends in defeat...
...For the lay reader, it is much like getting a complete health examination at a modern clinic...
...Busch is a man of considerable wit, with a gift for lively writing and a nice feeling for the precise word...
...This isolated primitive social microcosm has its own complex health environment which the natives over the centuries have learned to manage admirably—much better than the British administrators who blundered in and ignorantly wrecked the Fijian equivalents of the FAO, Unesco, the World Health Organization and several other newborn institutional hopefuls at the international level...
...A Novel About Reviewed by RUTH SILER SHADOW OF A HERO...
...He attends a big memorial meetlag, arranged by Tod Mullen, and his discomfort turns into suspicion...
...The only feature of American life that he took seriously was baseball: once, when Time had an opening for office boys, Hadden had all the applicants fill out a questionnaire on baseball, then based his selection exclusively on the knowledge of the game shown by the boys...
...In general, he was disdainful of his readers, and was often amazed when he found that they took his magazine seriously...
...Ever .since then $he idea that city governments and politics in general not only ought to be honest but can be made so has gained enough support to result in sporadic jwlitieal house cleanings...
...The experts have had' their say and they haven't said ^vhere we go from here in public health and how...
...Every smooth surface of Kelleher's life yields a cesspool of corruption...
...Harvard Vniver* sity Press...
...James Rorty, a frequent contributor to The New Leader, is the author of Our Master's Voice and co-author of Tomorrow's Food...
...THE CHIEF VALUE OF THIS BOOK, aside from its great readability, is what it proves about the profession of editing...
...in crises that we all pay the full penalty for permitting the machine bosses to run our lives...
...Shadow of a Hero...
...Suddenly the politics of their creatures translate themselves into the cruder terms of hunger and war...
...In times of plenty, in times of peace, the messes created by the dogcatchers and the mayors and the senators and the presidents produced by the machines are seldom too obvious...
...Any one of these people would have been excellently equipped to do the generalizing job that is lacking in this volume...
...He, together with the editor and another member of the newspaper's staff are fired for publishing the truth about Kelleher...
...Both edited with elan and had a lot of fun with their work...
...Unsuccessful editors have been those who tried to placate various groups of people whom they thought to be readers—actually, no editor ever has a very clear idea of who his readers are—and printed material which they personally did not like, but which seemed to them fit for the less intelligent masses...
...It would be a pity if the book were not read widely enough to rescue Hadden from semiobscurity...
...The Kelleher case stirs an undefinable, uncomfortable memory in him...
...Backed by his editor, he starts investigation and slowly and painfully uncovers the truth...
...Edited by James Steven* Simmons, with a foreword by James Bryant Conant...
...And for the second time the author, Allan Chase, gives us stern warning about imminent danger...
...Book editor Steve Rome of the News is disturbed by the whole business...
...Ruth Slier is a Callfomian working en her first novel...
...In the end, the politician stands revealed as merely a pawn, a glorified ward in Tod Mullen's machine, while the corruption of which he is a part and to which he contributes extends far beyond him—to the State Capitol, to the U. S. Senate...
...tT If ALMOST HALF A CENTURY now since Lincoln StefTens and his associates conducted their famous muck-racking campaigns exposing machine politica in the great cities of this country...
...How to Be An Editor Reviewed by HORACE SMITH BRITON MADDEN.By Noel Busch...
...The political bosses are still with us, jhore subtle now, more polished— Ind more dangerous...
Vol. 32 • May 1949 • No. 22
