Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR PUBLISHING I have just read Robert Gutwiliig's article "Reflections of a Publisher" (NL, December 5) with great interest. During the past several years my wife and I have been involved...
...This is understandable enough, for his reasoning was pointed in another direction...
...Kingston, N.Y...
...Was Nora Jim's Fulbright scholarship...
...Gutwiliig's thesis that something is wrong with publishing is undeniable: so many publishers seem to agree with him and national magazines frequently do pieces on the sad state of publishing...
...New York City Albert Fried Irving Kristol replies: 1 can see it coming now: Every time a journalist does a sloppy job of research, some kind person will explain that this is the privilege of a "non-fiction novel" and one must not take a "one-dimensional" view of the matter...
...Incidentally, an income of $170 a month puts this man some 20 per cent above the President's poverty line for "unrelated individuals living alone...
...It is the latter's responsibility to raise the issue, to point out the problems and to suggest possible answers...
...If his statement quoted above is to be correct, the Vietcong casualty figures which we claim should be grossly in excess of these 9,000 per month...
...Hyman can give no thought to it: but after all, we are dealing here with a truly new voice in the English language...
...suggested that we force North Vietnam to surrender...
...More power to such authors...
...For example, nowhere does Richard Elman ask that the Vietnam war be called off so we can spend more money on welfare...
...Even conservative Milton Friedman proposes direct Federal subsidies to anyone earning less than $3,000 a year...
...But he gets free medical services...
...The second question: Is there any evidence that the infiltration of North Vietnamese troops to the south would be any smaller if the routes were not bombed...
...He would rather dwell on those existing on the poverty line...
...In this respect, modern America, for ail its reforms and social services, offers less to the poor than it did in the days of the workhouse and the debtor prison...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...How much weight Paul Revere I and II should be given in press reports must depend less on the number of forces engaged by comparison with San Juan Hill or any other battle, or on its duration relative to that of Bel-leau Wood, or even on the enemy "body count" per se, than on its contribution to the shortening and the outcome of the war...
...General Marshall has implied in several passages that he believes these large and costly operations will lead us to an acceptable settlement, but he has not stated this opinion clearly nor has he adduced an argument of probability...
...I simply do not understand Graham's final point, or "the most serious error" to which it is directed...
...and (b) Kristol himself knows very little about life on the dole in New York City...
...Robert and Janet Yallum To paraphrase Irving Kristol...
...He says that "If we take...
...Hamburg, Germany Carl Landauer...
...So I think one can say that New York City is, if not generous, then at least not miserly toward its welfare clients...
...In addition, the pre-added allowance????without rent, medical care and emergency items—for a single man in New York City comes to less than $27 every two weeks (not one), which is even less generous than Kristol realized...
...she was, in letters, a simple woman...
...Have such large figures ever been given in U.S...
...To take one more example, Kristol writes...
...Kristol does not care for the book's thesis and for the way it was written...
...So much to Hyman's Shame and Sean...
...Using half-quotes, misquotes and his own imagination, Kristol invents spurious themes supposedly found in the book????and then proceeds to attack the author on these issues...
...Hyman cannot rescue his hasty, disdainful remarks by the last column of encomium...
...Germ's Choice...
...I would only point out that Milton Friedman's proposal would give $3,000 to a family of four, and????at the risk of repeating myself ????that this is less than such a family now receives from welfare in New York City...
...He is not turning out 15, 20, 100, 600 books a year...
...If the author, however, makes only $500 on a book, his difficulty is obvious...
...He puts out X number of books a year...
...New York City James J. Graham Senior Staff Attorney Columbia School of Social Work Irving Kristol has written an egregiously unfair review of Richard Elman's The Poorhouse State...
...It may also surprise Kristol to learn that alcoholic beverages are not the only luxuries excluded from the budget...
...On the one hand, it encourages them to consume as the minimal condition of their happiness...
...But this "reference" allows Kristol to note that "military expenditure includes feeding, clothing, training and doctoring soldiers"????perhaps the most constructive point in the review...
...It's great to see somebody beat the system...
...Don't worry so much about the poor, Kristol advises...
...If the Vietcong takes over the countryside, leaving only the cities and perhaps a narrow coastal strip in the possession of the Southern government, how is the food for the cities to be provided...
...Elman nowhere suggests that the poor should be as well off as everyone else, whatever that means...
...Graham...
...By the way: it really isn't cricket, nor is it sociology, to state that 150,000 New Yorkers receive under $2.00 an hour and then to jump to the conclusion that they are all heads of five-person families...
...These examples will suffice...
...In New York City, a single man on welfare, living in a furnished room, receives about $170 a month...
...In the light of recent studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that show more than 150,000 New Yorkers with average hourly earnings under $2.00 ($4,000 per year for a five-person family falls below welfare's "minimum needs" level), it is a fair guess that many more thousands of workers are eligible but have not applied for supplemental relief...
...It is possible to build factories in the countryside but it is certainly not possible to grow crops in cities...
...Kristol seems bent on appeasing those who form a backlash against facing the problem of the poor...
...Hyman had a chance to take an intimate look at what a new voice had to do and what he could not let happen to him, there in the early, pre-affluent part of our century...
...More generally, how did he arrive at the above-quoted statement...
...Princeton, N. J. Eugene P. Wioner Princeton University REPORTING VIETNAM The controversy between General S.L.A...
...But what of Jim and Nora, what they were to each other, what the letters said of this1...
...Out of this he has to pay his rent...
...Yet, is it not true that at the root of the general's disagreement with newsmen lies the question of how much military movements, even if successful by the standards of this war, will mean in the end...
...Elman's point," according to Kristol, is that people on welfare should be "(a) as well off as everyone else, if not more so, and (b) as independent as everyone else, if not more so...
...He is bought cheaply, often treated with great discourtesy, and his book is usually ignored by his publisher...
...Ail I can do is refer the reader to the book itself...
...Marshall ("Press Failure in Vietnam," NL, October 10) and the newsmen who replied to his article ("Reporting Vietnam," NL, November 21) touches on many significant questions, such as the performance of the press and the validity of information issued by the military...
...As for the rest of his points, I believe they are pretty much covered in my reply to Mr...
...He did, after all, spend years with her...
...It is not set up so the author can survive...
...Elman's "point," briefly stated, is that society at large plays cruel tricks on the poor...
...Let me say a word, finally, about Kristol's discourtesy...
...on the other, it systematically denies them the possibility of ever achieving that happiness...
...It's possible...
...But he does wish them to become independent...
...Third: What is the basis of the statement, "Then we would punish them [the North Vietnamese] and force them to surrender...
...The truth is, his review of the Richard Elman book????an inadequate book doubtlessly????breathes of a snobbish and modish contempt...
...It is easy for Elman to point out how much money could be spent on welfare if we called Continued on next page DEAR EDITOR off the Vietnam war...
...The Poorhouse State is unrecognizable from his essay of invective...
...Hyman tells us nothing about Joyce's need of Nora...
...One has the impression that the book and the views it sets forth are simply unworthy of Kristol's notice...
...might have been more appropriately titled, it strikes me, as Kristolnacht...
...One concludes that the monthly addition to the Vietcong force is well in excess of 9,000...
...He has a right to his opinions of course...
...The publishing business is geared to the publisher...
...Shame's Voice" (NL, December 5...
...What is really assailed in The Poorhouse State is a system that makes the social worker a policeman...
...Has any responsible statesman in the U.S...
...If these large-scale actions have brought the day substantially nearer when American soldiers (and war correspondents) can go home, when the frightful suffering of the civilian population will end, then, indeed, they are "the thing...
...If each makes $500, then his profit is X times $500...
...and during those years a high creativity flourished...
...The size of the North Vietnamese Army is not known to me, and perhaps Goodwin can supply this figure...
...The number of infiltrators to the South is, however, quite reliably estimated at 4,500 per month...
...Where on earth does James Graham get his welfare statistics from...
...What, after all...
...Nora's grammar was bad...
...and it is going to take far more than simple-minded indignation to abolish the Poorhouse State...
...GOODWIN Richard Goodwin's article ("What We Can Do About Vietnam," NL, November 7) forces a number of questions into one's mind, four of which I would like to see presented to him...
...Albert Feingold, M.D...
...He is the individual in the mass production business, and that kind of business has no place for an individual...
...but in view of the fact that many are under 21, it's not likely...
...It is grossly unfair to Elman to say that "he wants us to pity the paupers and despise social workers...
...Kristol rushes in to defend the social worker against Elman's supposed attack...
...Elman, without contradicting himself, does argue forcefully for this remedy...
...A few weeks before Gutwiliig's article in The Nkw Leader, Newsweek also did a long piece on the subject...
...But while Elman is critical of the war he no more demands that we call it off than Mayor Lindsay does...
...That's like asking a lawyer what's wrong with your liver...
...How many have there been...
...So...
...What is outrageous about that...
...If the rights of the welfare recipient are reduced, it is as meaningful to the rest of us as the erosion of our rights...
...New York City Hilda Schorr The poor are lucky in Irving Kristol—or should we employ his term, paupers...
...This Elman has done admirably in The Poorhouse State...
...But magazines always turn to the publishers to answer the question of what is wrong with publishing...
...In July, 1966 at least 10,000 Negro and Puerto Rican working fathers in this city, many of them union members, received welfare assist-ance to supplement wages above the minimum but below the poverty line...
...He is neither their friend nor enemy—he observes them objectively and dispassionately...
...The main point of Elman's attack on the welfare system is the degradation to which the poor must submit...
...The fourth question relates to the enclave proposal...
...The clear intent of the book is to persuade us that the present welfare system, like warfare, tends to dehumanize all connected with it...
...Its criticisms are directed against the welfare hierarchy, of which the social workers, too, are the victims...
...But, finally, the most serious error in the review concerns the relationship between welfare payments and the minimum wage...
...To which he "replies" that some low-paid workers with large families also receive modest supplementary welfare grants, and that others with large families could but are too proud to apply...
...Well, perhaps we live in tired times, and anyway, Jim wjs neither academic nor political, only human...
...Shakespeare...
...Elman's book deals with the indigent: a responsible reviewer should try to The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Donne, Joyce????who else...
...This would render many poor people independent of the welfare bureaucracy...
...Washington, D. C. Leonard Baker HYMAN It is an unhappy commentary on literary criticisms which are, after all, book reviews, that our critics become so involved with the sound of their own voices that the voices of their authors become only background music to our critics' dominant themes...
...I have read the figure 500,000 but do not consider it reliable...
...Albert Fried's insistence that The Poorhouse State shows no animus toward the social work profession puzzles me...
...Like Lindsay, he contrasts the open-handedness of our commitment there to the niggardliness of our commitment to ending poverty...
...cope with the writer's topic, not one of his own...
...the number of enemy we are supposed to be killing, add to that the defectors, along with a number of wounded much less than our own ratio of wounded to killed, we find we are wiping out virtually the entire North Vietnamese force every year...
...does he say of Joyce, except that the writer (artist) somehow got ahead of his own immediacy, and the more he got ahead of it, the more we read him...
...Too bad it has nothing to do with the book...
...As a result the author becomes the single expendable item in the business, the one factor that does not have to be taken seriously...
...Kristol writes: "He [Elman] wants us to pity the paupers and to despise social workers as parasites and exploiters of the poor and helpless...
...He says nothing of Joyce, or of those whose sympathy and interest helped to sustain him...
...His vitriolic denunciation of the "absurdities" contained in Richard Elman's The Poorhouse State reveals two things: (a) Kristol took a one-dimensional view of a book that combines elements of a non-fiction novel, treatise and documentary...
...entitled "The Pauper Problem" (NL, December 5...
...welfare also makes no provision for more mundane items such as Christmas toys for children...
...If he can show us that those military operations are not only vast, not only a testimony to American manhood????which nobody doubts????but that they will help us to get out of the calamity, then he will have dispersed a more important doubt than any he or we may entertain about the performance of American reporters, press officers or military historians...
...when the welfare poor have friendly critics like him, they have no further need of real enemies...
...During the past several years my wife and I have been involved in the writing of four books????two published with moderate success, one almost ready for publication and the fourth in the outline stage although contracted for...
...The business is set up so the publisher can survive...
...The fact that a man is destitute should not nullify his rights, including the right to be treated with dignity...
...But these are a separate case...
...It is certainly true that welfare, like war?and like politics, medicine, and other things too????tends to dehumanize all those connected with it...
...Occasionally an author like John O'Hara or Theodore H. White makes it big and demands the rewards that are due him...
...We are not as affluent as all that...
...Kristol might sometime inform himself about the conflicts now going on????and about to come to a head????between the social workers and the Welfare Department...
...he (ells us only that Joyce wrote a dirty letter to Nora, and that this same dirtiness was artistically transformed in passages of Ulysses...
...and also occasional "extras" on demonstration of need...
...KRISTOL Irving Kristol's cranky review of Richard Elman's fine book, The Poorhouse State...
...But to most of us a question which only marginally figured in the general's article, and in his rebuttal, is of vastly greater importance: Is the gallantry of our soldiers, the skill of our commanders, the superb technical equipment which we are employing, bringing us closer to the end of the war...
...I need not take up the numerous other distortions, which would require a piece twice as long as Kristol's...
...It is claimed that the bulk of Viet-cong recruits comes from South Vietnam itself...
...This is so in Stanley Edgar Hyman's ungenerous review of Joyce's letters, a review entitled, coyly...
...What hath Truman Capote wrought...
...If not, then Buddhist demonstrations, among other events, do deserve the greater weight, because of their obvious bearing on the results that fighting and suffering will produce...
...Your reviewer also suggests at one point that "time" is the only solution for the rising dependency rate, then on the same page accuses Elman of "cheap demagoguery" for refusing to recognize that expanded and improved public services and facilities are needed as well as increased welfare payments...
...Why was Jim with her...
...What is all this perverse and dirty whining and recrimination...
...I said that it is politically difficult to raise regular welfare payments above the level of low-paying jobs, since this would certainly cause widespread resentment among a large section of the working class...
...But this mild generalization does not justify Elman's picture of New York's social workers as selfish, callous and cynical...
...But compromise is the luxury of the politician, not the social critic...
...Why, then, did he deign to review it...
...communiques...
...He describes Elman in various places as a "shrill" and "mindless" iournalist who, "misguided" in his "extremism" and "simple-minded" in his "indignation," indulges in "cheap demagoguery," Deplorable, too, are the obiter dicta, ("If I thought The Poorhouse State had any chance of achieving a wide circulation, or being taken seriously, I would be alarmed . . . ") and the impatient, enormously condescending tone pervading the review as a whole...
...But he does not have the right to misrepresent Elman's opinions...
...New York City Stanley Plastrik May we suggest to Irving Kristol that he abandon either speed-reading or reviewing...
...Elman, in my opinion, also succeeds in shattering many popular misconceptions about reliefers, case workers, slumlords, etc...
...The Poorhouse State says nothing critical against social workers...
...Kristol has promiscuously lumped together two disparate ideas—distorting both in the process????thereby making Elman appear to be a sort of lunatic radical...
...The statement is false...
Vol. 50 • January 1967 • No. 1
