Democratic power springs from an enlightened electorate. The neglect of this possibility in America, the failure to protect and advance it with new form and content during a century and a half of expanding area and population, of complicating economy …
When FDR came to Washington in 1933 he was accompanied by dashing young economists and social scientists ready to remake the government, if not the world. Many were fresh from Columbia University, and quite unlike the Harvard—MIT contingent that now …
Fallout is the hormone of the small town mind a fallout shelter is sex that your shelter program for every home owner is sexing up the countryside and killing us in the bigcity bar. If this is good for the …
Facing a severe challenge from without and trouble from within, American opinion leaders feel the need to assure themselves that the ship of state is under firm control. The debate on national goals with which we are deluged today is …
In the age of Eisenhower, America’s civil defense “program” was an amusing fraud. Presidential, Congressional and public apathy inspired bumbling CD officials to actions that were sublimely ridiculous. Back in 1952, when no constructive use could be found for the …
The idea of work camps for unemployed teen-agers has always been attractive, it has somehow seemed “right.” So it recurs whenever, as now, the competitive labor market begins to fail these youth. The camps are first set up as a …
Now that our distinguished liberal intellectuals have finished proclaiming “the end of ideology,” it begins to seem that we are entering an intensely ideological period in American history. After living in California only a few months, one discovers that the …
It is a long time now since craftsmen in the trade regarded with amusement any statements suggesting that publishing was a business—publishers had considered themselves gentlemen, not businessmen, and their declared concern had been with art, not commerce. But that …
For a full decade now—for a span of years that is gradually coming into focus as a historical epoch in its own right—the major countries of Western Europe have been living under conservative rule. This situation has created new and …
The letters column of the July ’61 number of Mad comics under the banner, “A Mad State of Affairs,” features a photograph of the daughter of the governor of North Carolina smilingly enthroned in bed with a batch of Mads. …
THE FUTILITARIAN SOCIETY, by Wiliam J. Newman. George Braziller. 1961. William J. Newman’s theme can be expressed in a loose syllogism: America’s problems call for change and innovation. But conservatives are “stasis seekers.” Therefore conservative ideas are a “menace” to …
THE AMERICANS: Photographs by Robert Frank, introduction by Jack Kerouac. Grove Press. 1959. Shortly before Joe Hill was executed by the state of Utah, he requested that his ashes be scattered in every state of the union, except Utah. That …
Reading your special issue, Cuba: The Invasion and Its Consequences, was indeed a painful experience. In the aftermath of the Cuban “fiasco” surely more could be expected from a magazine that claims to be democratic socialist and radical than this …
The FLN Editors: In the Spring/1961 issue of Dissent your Paris correspondent, Paul Parisot, states that “The FLN is tied to the International Communist bloc and includes an internal tendency whose orientation, thought and fundamental political conceptions have nothing in …
WHEN THE SOVIET UNION resumed its testing of nuclear weapons, it was a catastrophe for mankind. When the United States announced several days later that it would start underground testing—it is not yet clear, at the time of writing, whether …
