Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR POLITICAL MAGIC William Bohn, in his article "Political Magic" (NL, February 1) says that it is a false notion to think that election results depend on the techniques of political...
...Should this ritual be curtailed or modified, and if so how...
...In part this has ben due to a well-founded fear of imposing conformity...
...5. Would not the cost of a program of ideological guidance, sponsored by foundations and carried out by volunteer specialists in various fields, be insignificant in relation to the national economy...
...Is the opinion of youth really so insignificant and ephemeral...
...To what extent does political extremism influence decisions to enter the teaching or academic professions and to what extent are students politically influenced by extremist instructors...
...From the New England transcendental poets, and especially from Emerson, Eliot also learned Buddhism...
...With all the influence of organized wealth and respectable society marshalled against the Democrats their defeat was almost inevitable...
...by supporting candidates who promised to try to help us, even though we were aware of their far more important shortcomings (God help me, I voted for Barry Goldwater...
...What other characteristics render students vulnerable to extremist ideologies...
...Workers by the hundreds of thousands were told not to return to work after election day if the Democrats won...
...But should ideological guidance be regarded and directed as an attempt to create conformity or as an attempt to preserve and strengthen the framework in which diversity can survive...
...The issue of political freedom is one which could potentially unite a vast number of the existing political groupings, including many Socialist parties, and perhaps eventually, some presently authoritarian parties...
...It may have been an honest Republican ticket, but how can Bohn call it an honest election, devoid of the techniques of political experts...
...I would suggest The new leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, bnt letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Another bull's-eye...
...3. The normative questions concerned with extremism ought to be faced honestly...
...Babbitt was a professor of French literature at Harvard, but the most important thing about him was that he was a Buddhist...
...Then, a thousand miles from here, back home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, I'll hear sick, lame, tortured voices calling—not for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare—but for me...
...The sand outside my picture window is striped by the sun and the fronds of my own palm tree...
...If not sick to the death, we are at least sick to Fort Lauderdale...
...Carman, Syrett and Wishy in A History of the American People write: "Many businessmen drawing up contracts, inserted in them a clause making their validity contingent on Bryan's defeat...
...But Hyman, unfortunately, no doubt wrote hastily against a deadline and did not develop his most interesting point, which is precisely that Eliot's poetry belongs to American literature...
...workingmen's pay envelopes frequently contained notices warning that a Democratic victory would cost them their jobs...
...by contributions of money in lieu of time...
...and by organizing instruments of political action which no one had the time or knowledge to use (I was a county representative of the Kentucky Medical Political Action Committee...
...New Hyde Park, N.Y...
...New York City GERALD PINSKY...
...Most people who like T. S. Eliot's poetry don't like his criticism, but don't know why...
...and some farmers were threatened with foreclosure if the silver interests carried the election...
...I would like to quote what two historians say regarding that election...
...Professor Arthur S. Link in his book American Epoch writes: "All the influence that money could buy was brought to bear against Bryan...
...LUTHER MARTIN WILSON...
...Fort Lauderdale, Fta...
...Did McKinley win the election through the "magic of human character" or through big business...
...I'll gladly go...
...If not, are non-coercive measures justified...
...If so, under what circumstances...
...JR., M.D...
...by private conversation with patients (when our time should be devoted to their ills...
...The article ends with the querulous: "The absence of critical and dissenting voices, on this occasion, cannot be regarded as a very healthy symptom...
...YOUTH AND POLITICS Your publication of Steven Kel man's article "Youth and Politics" (NL, February 1) and the subsequent letters of readers relating their experiences with Left-wing extremist activities among students, is a useful contribution to an important but much neglected subject...
...The mainstream of literary criticism in America, especially non-academic, essentially has been anti-classic and pro-romantic, glorifying spontaneity as identical with the sensuous enjoyment of life...
...Baltimore, Md...
...That's a bull's-eye if I ever saw one, and most of us regarded it as political Pablum...
...We are not deaf and mute—only muted...
...This compulsory ritual is obnoxious to many thinking persons, and as such is ideologically counterproductive insofar as these persons are concerned...
...If so, are all forms of this extremism or only some forms of concern...
...These are tendencies which, by the way, are hobbling our foreign policy...
...The martinis will be extra dry and cold this evening and Bonnie at the piano will be Hildegarde after my second one...
...If our efforts have achieved even a voice to speak for us in l i e councils of the government of this nation, I am not hearing that voice...
...Diagnoses will still be made by the doctor who knows the patient, visits him at all hours as far as possible, and still lays a cool band on the brow...
...I miss in Hyman's piece two of the most important clues to an understanding of Eliot: that Irving Babbitt was by far the most important influential teacher in his life, and the equally strong influence upon Eliot of the New England transcendental poets...
...The growth of Left-wing extremist opinion among students seems related to an increasing polarization of articulate opinion between Right-wing extremists and Leftist-appeasement elements, both of which reject the post-World War II policy of the containment of Communist imperialism...
...My love for T. S. Eliot's poetry was the one influence, for many decades, that saved me from ossifying into this notion...
...A great deal in Eliot which has been marked down as Christian asceticism and narrowness will eventually be understood as his heritage from the Buddhist influences upon him...
...I am here in Fort Lauderdale— heaven with palm trees for the middle class— trying to regain the moral, emotional and physical stamina to face it again...
...DEAR EDITOR POLITICAL MAGIC William Bohn, in his article "Political Magic" (NL, February 1) says that it is a false notion to think that election results depend on the techniques of political experts...
...We have long known that the entire issue has been made a political football (touch, not tackle) for the use of men we cannot reach...
...A. Hilsenrad T. S. ELIOT Stanley Edgar Hyman's short essay on T. S. Eliot, written at the time of Eliot's death (NL, February 1), says a good many intelligent things about our greatest American poet...
...Can these forms be operationally defined...
...Those who share my love for Eliot's poetry have no reason to be ashamed of his alleged narrowness and racism...
...A few more days should do it...
...4. The instrumental aspects of ideological guidance have been much neglected in the United States...
...To oversimplify for the sake of this letter, Kristol says that the President's campaign proposal of a massive, frontal assault on heart disease, cancer, and stroke was a "facile and bland exaggeration of the promise of modern medicine...
...To what extent do such students come from homes where residual Stalinist or Stalinoid tendencies may persist...
...Are not individuals like the Rosenbergs and Lee Oswald and Malcom X worth saving from extremism, for their own sakes as well as to avoid the damage which they otherwise cause...
...This is the one point on which Hyman is quite wrong, to think that Eliot was ever a racist...
...Are coercive countermeasures justified...
...The chief administrator of government medicine in my state, the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is not worried about the future of medical practice...
...Your diagnoses," he says, "wiM be made for you in large, well-equipped centers with all facilities...
...England has been much more fortunate than wo in this regard...
...Felix Morrow DEATH AND POLITICS Had I been at home hard at work, I could have controlled my reaction to Irving Kristol's "Of Death and Politics" (NL, January 18...
...that future investigation and planning in this area include the following questions: 1. The influence of more general political trends on student sentiment...
...We have fought with what pitiful forces we could muster...
...Is political extremism a source of concern for the community...
...what has been termed asceticism will be understood eventually as a passion for perfection, and the narrowness will be better understood as a seeking for the purposeful conduct of life Eliot's poetry is justly admired and enjoyed in spite of most of the literary criticism of the last 40 or more years...
...Once, just this once, I've had the overwhelming need to tell somebody so...
...What particular measures might be legitimately undertaken...
...The large middle class of the medical profession—the abler family doctors, general surgeons, pediatricians, and the like—are disgusted with the rather one-sided debate on the direction of modern medicine...
...While it would be most difficult to establish and maintain, such an international movement could provide an effective focus for the enthusiasm of youth at home and abroad...
...I think especially of the great critic and editor, A. R. Orage, who first in the New Age (1915-1921) and then in the New English Weekly (1931-1935) taught several generations that one could be against the slovenliness of H. G. Wells, the occasional time-serving of Arnold Bennett, and the shallower aspects of George Bernard Shaw, without thereby being against socialism and democracy...
...If anyone is listening, for a change, I'd like to give one man's explanation of the origin of that silence...
...Much of what passes for ideological guidance in the United States is nationalist ritual imposed by extremist Right-wing groups, although much more widely supported...
...There hasn't been any click yet and it would have been unbearable to let the article escape comment...
...He takes us back to the election of William McKinley who, he thinks, won that election through the "magic of human character...
...Bullshit...
...The lack of intelligent discussion of this topic seems related on the one hand to the tendency of American analysts to leave ideological questions to the crackpots and extremists, and on the other hand to the similar American tendency to downgrade the intellectual and political aspects of youth...
...2. The specific sources of Leftist extremism (as well as Rightist extremism) ought to be examined...
...I cannot think of one critic of any stature and influence in all that time in America who defended conscious control of art and life, which is what classicism has meant as against romanticism...
...As one who practically started his adult life by writing a "major" attack against Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt's co-thinker, I am painfully aware how many of us shared and expressed this hopelessly stupid idea that shallow optimism, atheism, spontaneity, social progress, romanticism in literature, all were of a piece...
...But I wasn't...
Vol. 48 • March 1965 • No. 6
