Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. KITMAN Marvin Kitman's cynical attitude toward the efforts of the...
...The Kennedy Commitment," NL, June 17) i am reminded of a recent conversation i had with a teacher from Connecticut who was born in the South...
...There has been so much violence that perhaps at last reason is being considered as an alternative...
...Los Angeles, Calif...
...Whether this attitude of moderation and reflection combined with a firm moral commitment can win the electorate 1 don't know, but certainly McCarthy's showing at the polls gives cause for hope...
...Whatever the motives, the result will be beneficial...
...Susan Rich PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES As Robert Sandoz writes, "His country was not ready for Robert F. Kennedy...
...A President strongly committed to one power bloc or another is going to have a hard time preventing the growing polarization in the land...
...New York City John Marculies...
...I am glad the networks are moving forward, even if they do not proceed with the motives of angels...
...New York City Arnold Nikole THE UNDERGROUND Martin Esslin compares the cultural creativity of prewar Vienna with "an analogous development in the theater...
...I think Nixon from the other end would also engender it...
...I think Robert Kennedy would have encountered this problem...
...Pop art, and the social ferment of the underground" in Britain and America today ("Crucible of the 20th Century," NL...
...Humphrey would be helpless to stop the process begun by his predecessor, because he too is committed to the same disastrous course as LBJ: trying to please everybody at the same time, and winding up satisfying no one...
...What I object to is both the generalization and the credit Esslin is heaping on the "underground," whose achievements are as yet not exactly awesome...
...Thinking of that child...
...It is precisely because of his detachment that he irks the civil rights militants...
...In addition, these talents are not exactly reaching a creative peak these days, but on the contrary are all experiencing the characteristic decline of most American writers after their earlier periods of productivity...
...Now Negro children will see Negroes in all kinds of roles, taking part in society like all other people...
...I recall a little Negro girl of five, a child of a friend, straining forward intently when Negro singing groups appeared on the Ed Sullivan show...
...The real talents we have did not issue from what we know as the underground: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Albee, Updike, Mailer...
...We may be entirely right, but in doing so we are inevitably raising problems for ourselves: The new forgotten men—the white workers—are growing resentful and dissatisfied...
...i believe McCarthy is by and large the only candidate with the proper degree of detachment to attempt to unite the country...
...June 3...
...But 1 cannot really think of who he has in mind, at least in America, equal to the figures of the era he speaks of: Freud, Musil, Kafka, Broch, Hof-mannsthal, Schnitzler, Herzl, Trotsky, Schoen-berg, et al...
...To my amazement he was supporting Wallace for President, and he was neither stupid nor crazy...
...He spoke of the lower-and middle-class whites in bis city who felt they were forgotten men...
...And coming from a similar background himself, he sympathized with their arguments and their plight...
...I remember thinking then (several years back) that this child must see so few people with her skin color on television, and usually if not always as performers—a special category, which like sports, permits Negroes entry, and which is an inverse form of segregation...
...Those of us who support the civil rights cause are in a sense, while helping one group, completely ignoring another...
...While I do not know the solution to this dilemma, I do think our selection of a Presidential candidate should be based on an awareness of the problem...
...They too, he said, wanted to be moved into modern new apartments and be given priority for jobs...
...yet it is not indifference that he is revealing, but an awareness of the complexity of the task and of the many factors to be considered...
...While I answered his arguments by contending that Negroes were not given a fair chance in the first place to gain a foothold in society, i could not help but think in the back of my mind that he had a point...
...KITMAN Marvin Kitman's cynical attitude toward the efforts of the television networks to place more Negroes in programs is regrettable (''On Television" NL, June 3...
...It is true that the "solid structure of bourgeois society" has eroded, but I think it is foolish lo maintain that as a result we have entered a great creative period...
...I wish people like Esslin would be a little patient before categorizing and labelling a period: I too hope for a creative upsurge, one which will produce more evidence of talent than The Fugs and The East Village Other...
Vol. 51 • August 1968 • No. 15
