Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR HAMMARSKJOLD Lincoln P. Bloomfield's review of Dag Hammarskjold's Markings ("Diary of a Political Artist," NL, November 9) was a superb evocation of this statesman's presence as...
...For Danaceau deals not in facts but in distortion...
...Can it be that Danaceau confuses rural America with the rural South...
...I am tired of bifurcations and simplistic rallying cries—whether they emanate from Barry Goldwater or Paul Danaceau...
...His language is divisive...
...URBAN If Paul Danaceau's "Time for Debriefing" (NL, November 9) was written before the election for release afterward, it is merely a rather silly piece of journalese...
...New York City Alvin E. Ellis RURAL VS...
...Quite the contrary...
...Italics are mine...
...In Danaceau's view, the Right wing or...
...As does the resounding two-to-one majority by which urban California voted to repeal a fair housing act...
...If it was in truth, written after the election, it is unforgivable...
...Danaceau's America apparently may be divided into two camps...
...Now anyone who has read Conscience of a Conservative knows that Goldwater is not a populist of any kind...
...But if the farm mistrusts the city, the city just as surely mistrusts the farm...
...The Right wing, it seems, is "rooted in fundamentalist, rural mistrust and fear of the city...
...Charles E. Bofbel Jr...
...One is grateful to Bloomfield for avoiding the dualism into which discussion cf this book has fallen, and for reminding us that great political gifts existed side by side with a mystical temperament...
...On one side is the "city" or the "enlightened...
...DEAR EDITOR HAMMARSKJOLD Lincoln P. Bloomfield's review of Dag Hammarskjold's Markings ("Diary of a Political Artist," NL, November 9) was a superb evocation of this statesman's presence as it was felt on the world scene during his lifetime...
...On the other is the "country" or the "fearful...
...Tucson, Ariz...
...I, for one, feel that President Johnson's "Come let us reason together" expresses exactly the right approach to our domestic problems...
...The heavy pro-Johnson vote in the Middle west disproves half of Danaceau's thesis, and Gold water's popularity in the megalopolis of Southern California takes care of the remainder...
...Just as, from another point of view, (not necessarily rural) Socialists and Communists know that they can still infiltrate the State Department and the courts...
...That is why rural states like Iowa and Nebraska went to Johnson by substantial majorities...
...by implication, the "country" knows that there are "still school boards to infiltrate" and "governors to be pushed into state capitols...
...Goldwater is the prophet of a "warped populism...
...I have no sympathy with Goldwater Republicanism, and I freely admit that much of America is appallingly out of touch with the problems of the city...
...And Danaceau's article does nothing to dispel this mistrust...
...A meaningless statement such as "it takes happy hearts to trundle off to the Great Society' is certainly innocuous, and the vague paragraph in which Danaceau charges the Republican campaign with being "basically anti-urban and even anti-Northern urban" would be tolerable, if that paragraph did not represent Danaceau's method of handling far more important issues...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 25
