Night Comes to the Cumberland: A Biography of a Depressed Area by Harry C. Caudill, foreword by Stewart Udall Little, Brown and Co., 1963, 394 pp., $6.75 The mountain ballad is a sad song. Harry Caudill’s book has the tone …
Crisis in Black and White by Charles E. Silberman Random House, 1964, 370 pp., $5.95 “If whites were to stop all discriminatory practices tomorrow, this alone would not solve ‘the Negro problem.’ To be sure, an end to discrimination is …
The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940 by Isaac Deutscher Oxford University Press, 523 pp., $9.50 Now the author brings to its sorrowful end the story of Leon Trotsky, the biography begun with The Prophet Armed, continued with The Prophet Unarmed, and …
The brief life of Anne Parsons was a search for purity and meaning, a longing for a better world to live in. There was about it the white beauty of a church steeple or of a fresh snowfall in the …
There are two signs on Manhattan’s E. 2nd St. One in neat blue letters announces the headquarters of Mobilization for Youth. The other in scrawled yellow paint stakes out 2nd St. as “Dragon’s Territory”; beneath it the same hand has …
The writer had the good fortune to be on March 6, 1963, at the Institute for the Advanced Contemplation of Human Affairs in Fordograd. The annual self-criticism meeting in the Explanation Division was slightly expanded in view of its decennial …
Even the least popular regimes in Asia find men to join their armies. These men are the rice soldiers. They are not soldiers in the usual sense, no matter how much they may look like soldiers and no matter how …
“You can’t do nothing with them white folks. They have the money and the power. When they feel like doing something, they’ll do it. I asked Mr. Barry [the landlord] to fix my bathroom, and he says he will. Those …
In recent years, managerial elites have urgently sought to justify what it is they do. As Wilbert Moore remarked in his Conduct of the Corporation (1962), executives have become worried about the merit of their positions, the salaries they receive …
Alienation is now itself an ideology. It is also a category into which many different kinds of experience are directed and in effect lost. Yet the basic emphasis, on an absence or loss of connection or community, remains central to …
The paddy wagons stopped in the narrow Freedom Alley that runs behind the Albany, Georgia, jail. One of the cops ran ahead and unlocked the heavy metal door, and the others dragged us out and across the gravelly court and …
We print below a condensed transcript of a discussion held in May 1964 between a number of leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement and several editors of DISSENT. Among the participants: Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington …
Half the art of politics consists in timing. Programs cease to be relevant after a certain point; they matter only if applied at the appropriate moment. For years now both radical and even non-radical students of the Vietnamese situation have …
The increase in the freedom of ordinary men and women during the last two generations has taken place, not in spite of the action of Governments, but because of it. It has been due to the fact that, once political …
