The looted stores are still vacant and the burned-out ones still heaps of rubble. But an ironic and ludicrous quality pervades Watts, for hoardes of investigators, analysts and reporters have descended upon the area with clip boards, tape recorders and …
U.S. policy in the Dominican Republic may take a slight turn for the better with the transfer of Ambassador Tapely Bennett to Portugal, a country that shares his antipathy to democracy. The reasons for the current “rethinking” in Washington are …
Something important is happening in South Vietnam, even if its exact nature is not yet clear. The demonstrations in Saigon and Hue, the consolidation of the Buddhist factions into an apparently united force, the visible weakness of Ky’s military government …
In The Political Economy of Slavery, Eugene Genovese has made an original contribution to our understanding of ante-bellum Southern history. His contribution lies not so much in the discovery of new facts as in placing familiar materials in a fresh theoretical context. Genovese is the first to systematically …
One always preserves the fears of his youth. Those who grew up in the fifties will never forget McCarthy: when they see a Communist being attacked, they are sure it’s a witch hunt. Some liberals are so obsessed by the …
By now, there is a fair-sized library devoted to the definition and description of poverty in the United States. The Government itself has financed some excellent studies (Mollie Orshansky’s analysis for the Social Security Administration is an outstanding example). And …
Indonesia is passing through a period which could lead to its disintegration as a nation. The standing of its new military government and its leader Bung Karno has dropped to zero. The admitted slaughter of 87,000 Communists (according to Sukarno) …
Conor Cruise O’Brien, at least on the international scene the radical-liberal intellectual par excellence, has recently published a new collection of articles and speeches, Writers and Politics. As a United Nations official effectively in charge of the UN’s Congo operation, …
“A change is gonna come” is the battle hymn of the New Left. But after a year of marching around the “Establishment” walls, which not only didn’t fall down but hardly shook at all, Students for a Democratic Society is …
Never, to my knowledge, in the history of intellectual controversy has any book met such devastating refutation as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem in Jacob Robinson’s critique, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight.* After Robinson’s argument not a single …
The first year of the effort to reinvigorate the League for Industrial Democracy has been completed. It is time to take stock. When Michael Harrington was named LID Chairman in September, 1964, and a young staff took over the office, …
The culmination of intensive efforts to codify the life of the hapless is a document published by the Department of Labor entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and commonly referred to as “The Moynihan Report,” after the …
American liberals have traditionally believed that many of the country’s problems were susceptible to gradual and comparatively painless solution by combining education and technological innovation. In part, this assumption is correct. But most of America’s problems are rooted not in …
The Moynihan Report employs supposed inadequacies of the Negro family as an explanatory tool for understanding why the Negro has not taken his place fully in the economic structure of our society. Presumed family pathology particularly illegitimacy, is said to …
Paul Jacobs has written an intensely personal autobiography. Throughout the book he is trying to tell the reader how he felt about whatever he was doing during his youth as an American radical—or at least what he now thinks were …
