A decade ago Tom Wolfe coined the term “radical chic” to describe what he regarded as a trendy identification of the wealthy with the poor. Wolfe’s 1970 essay focused on a benefit for the Black Panther party, and what he …
As a child growing up in Ohio, I thought of the Cleveland Browns as gods. In that belief I was no different from most of my school friends. Our fall Sundays were spent watching the Browns on television or, if …
“What are they like?” Because I teach and because the college at which I teach, Sarah Lawrence, has a reputation for being experimental, I am constantly asked this question about my students. Most of the time I resist answering. I …
The turn of the century brought with it a special kind of regimentation for the American worker. As labor historian David Brody has noted, after 1900 the wage earner stood “wholly within the modern industrial order.” There was less of …
Long after it should be dead at the box office, Kramer vs. Kramer is still thriving. It is not hard to figure out why. Kramer vs. Kramer is a film with a subject to wrench the heart—a failed New York …
Unlike most books by former athletes, Dallas Cowboy wide receiver Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty is anything but a modest “I was there” piece of writing. Although structured around eight days in the life of Phil Elliott (like Gent, a …
Roanoke Rapids, N.C. July 18, 1977 Dear Ann: No matter how long I stay here I’m sure to go on feeling like Rip Van Winkle. Twelve years after Mississippi I’m back in a South I still can’t believe. It’s not …
Four years after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War has become the most important subject in American film. Just why is not clear, but certainly it is a phenomenon that invites suspicion as though, in a period of Jonestown massacres and Gary Gilmore executions, …
John Ford in Grapes of Wrath, Martin Ritt in The Molhv Maguires, Hal Ashby in Bound for Glory have all shown that the union movement can be powerful material for the screen. Yet we do not have in this country …
Setting on my front porch swing I’m like a man forgotten Head all filled up with angry thoughts And lungs filled up with cotton Fourteen years ago, the Textile Workers Union began their campaign to organize J. P. Stevens, the …
It is billed, by its own production company, as a “warm and comic exploration of the rapidly changing world of a group of friends working on a small weekly newspaper.” And certainly it is this softness that accounts for its …
The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973, by Diane Ravitch. New York: Basic Books. 449 pp. The importance of Diane Ravitch’s The Great School Wars is, I think, best illustrated by turning for a moment to Christopher Jencks’s assessment …
The Teamster actions are disgraceful. They are clearly union-busting. They are engaged in a concerted campaign to wipe out the United Farm Workers. —George Meany Ever since 1968, Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers have had two principal opponents: the growers …
Los Angeles, 1967 I pronounce it like FDR’s middle name, and the man at the Greyhound ticket window stares at me. “The bus don’t stop at no place like that!” “You sure?” He nods, and then I spell it out, …
In California, where agriculture has an occupational disease rate 50 percent higher than any other industry, people have known for some time that farm workers are endangered by pesticides. Since 1954 the number of doctors’ reports involving pesticides and agricultural …
