A Portrait of a UAW Local in Chicago The split-level house of American labor is divided into 190 national and international unions, with over 70,000 affiliated locals. Given the heterogeneity of American workers, any generalization is bound to be faulty. …
Winston Churchill once said that the public attitude toward criminals constitutes “a sure test of the level of civilization.” 1 If so, then these essentials of the liberal doctrine as set forth by Leon Radzinowicz should not be forgotten: Since …
HOW CAN ANYBODY raise more than about one-half of a cheer for the tattered British Labour party? Few Britons would go that far. Seeing themselves as condemned to five years of Hard Labour, they are more likely to hiss or …
In Chicago, Allen Ginsberg declared that the 35th National Democratic Convention was a mass hallucination. Maybe he is right, and the whole thing never happened. His account should be interesting; Jean Genet’s more so; and Norman Mailer will have much …
Is mass culture an abomination, a harmless anodyne, or a blessing? These are the real, if often merely implicit, questions in an interminable and ferocious debate.
Flying back to Detroit, it dawned on me that in these riotous times you can go home again. I was prepared for lots of deja vu. From chaos to chaos, what’s a twentyfour-year interval? In my home town, where I …
Many young, middleclass radicals know little more about organized labor in the United States than that it is “stagnant,” “sclerotic,” and “inert.” Such epithets would fit even better than they do if Walter Reuther had not recently applied all of …
To nobody’s surprise, the amiable man of limited educability and his venomous protege won themselves a thumping victory. Ike, the charismatic non-leader, “manifested” himself here and there, brought his magic aura with him, smiled and tranquilized a restive people. While …
Ours is an omnivorous culture. Even the most prickly and apparently indigestible of critics, like Lenny Bruce and Paul Goodman, get cannibalized. It ought therefore to surprise no one that a socialist leader in America should be universally honored as …
For a long time, we of the anti-Communist Left have been politically dispossessed. There is no home for us in either of the big national parties. There never was. Every few years, a few of our breed will allow themselves …
Hunger, illiteracy, unemployment, an exploding population, race conflict, strife between the oppressive oligarchy and the miserable masses, with no middle class to stabilize a backward economy: are these the familiar problems of all Latin America? Then, a powerful case must …
To be contemptuous of the fine arts in suburbia has by now come to seem as “peculiar” as respect for or practice of the fine arts used to be in small-town America. The suburban Babbitt knows that he had better …
THE PEACE RACE, by Seymour Melman. Ballantine. 152 pp. 1961. In his eloquent address at the United Nations, President Kennedy warned that if a peace race did not supersede the arms race, our globe might be turned into a flaming …
Anything as bad a TV must be susceptible to some improvement, but the one sure way of not getting it is to make the programs more “cultural.” The TV chains and the FCC are momentarily nervous, and so they chatter …
Omnivorousness is perhaps the most striking quality of corporate civilization. Every idea, like every thing and no matter what its origins, is swallowed, absorbed and reused. This condition was brought home to me recently by an acquaintance of mine who …
