Talkin’ Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912 by Elliott Shore University Press of Kansas, 1988, 280 pp., $25.00 Few problems have troubled U.S. historians more than the question Werner Sombart posed in …
In 1987, at the outset of the Pit (“Praise the Lord”) scandal, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart solemnly announced that “the gospel of Jesus Christ has never sunk to such a level as it has today.” Never mind the Inquisition: it …
I first came to really know Mike Harrington in 1976 on a lecture tour in India arranged by the USIA for International Women’s Year. My tour included a small conference on “Social Diversity, Economic Inequality and Political Integration” at a …
The night is cold and damp as our weary group finishes a day-long drive. We follow the beaten pickup through back roads for several miles, then up a winding dirt road. We pass a check-in point staffed by camouflage-clad volunteers …
Categories often exert a tyranny over our perceptions and judgments. An old joke— perhaps it even happened—from the bad old days of McCarthyism tells of a leftist rally in Philadelphia, viciously broken up by the police. A passerby gets caught …
Everyone remembers the first time he or she heard Michael Harrington speak. Mine was sometime in the early seventies in a drab room at the Catholic Worker house on the Lower East Side. I didn’t know Mike’s history with the …
“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1936. A half century later, Keynes’s fear seems just as warranted as …
More insidiously than any other decade in our history, the 1980s have delivered unto us (and into our homes) the promises of past futurists: sit back, relax, and let your fingers do the walking across the universe of simulated experience. …
Where did he get the energy? Apart from his amazing productivity and range of activities, he even looked energetic, like a light bulb. Not having been among his personal friends, I have no intimate insight into this mystery. I observed …
In 1955 Mike came up to Brandeis to confer with the ten members of the progressive political club. There was plenty of left-minded political passion on the campus, but few saw hope for active politics in those Eisenhower years. Mike …
Last year, at about the time a young black man was killed on the streets of Bensonhurst, Cardinal Glemp, the Roman Catholic primate of Poland, abrogated an agreement to relocate a convent from the site of Auschwitz. Aside from being …
I didn’t know Michael Harrington personally, but in the public man I felt I had a special and elegant friend. First and last, I admired the lucid power and moral clarity of his prose, a legacy that will endure beyond …
The following dialogue between Abraham Brumberg and Irving Howe took place in early October 1989. Abraham Brumberg is a widely published authority on Soviet and Eastern European affairs and editor of the forthcoming Perestroika: Chronicle of a Revolution, published by …
Income inequality in the United States is growing with alarming speed. The biggest beneficiaries of this trend are those who least need it, the super-rich, while the most severe victims are those who can least afford it, children. As Leonard …
The passions unleashed by Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses seem at first glance to be a perfect example of what the novel itself identifies as postmodern sensibility, that of a society capable only of pastiche, which cultivates “the image instead …
