If anyone except a trade-union president—say a bank president, an old-line political boss, an insurance-company president, or a corporation lawyer—had ordered as much cash and manpower into an election campaign as Walter Reuther mobilized for Jack Kennedy, he would have …
Scandinavia Liberals can always be made uneasy when told the “fact” that suicide rates and other indices of social disorganization are very high in the Scandinavian countries under the welfare state. This “fact,” it turns out, just isn’t one. The …
These days we don’t ask of a new president “what will he do?” but “how will he appear?” The image of the leader at home, and now the “credibility” of his intentions abroad—these are the crucial elements of contemporary politics. …
Fallout is the hormone of the small town mind a fallout shelter is sex that your shelter program for every home owner is sexing up the countryside and killing us in the bigcity bar. If this is good for the …
Facing a severe challenge from without and trouble from within, American opinion leaders feel the need to assure themselves that the ship of state is under firm control. The debate on national goals with which we are deluged today is …
In the age of Eisenhower, America’s civil defense “program” was an amusing fraud. Presidential, Congressional and public apathy inspired bumbling CD officials to actions that were sublimely ridiculous. Back in 1952, when no constructive use could be found for the …
The idea of work camps for unemployed teen-agers has always been attractive, it has somehow seemed “right.” So it recurs whenever, as now, the competitive labor market begins to fail these youth. The camps are first set up as a …
Now that our distinguished liberal intellectuals have finished proclaiming “the end of ideology,” it begins to seem that we are entering an intensely ideological period in American history. After living in California only a few months, one discovers that the …
Sociology has long concentrated on the study of vertical social mobility, that is the movement of persons up or down the social hierarchy. I wish to point out here that the approach to this subject has so far been unduly …
Socialist parties in almost every country are today experiencing a crisis which affects their thinking, structure, strategy and tactics. To understand the basic reasons for this, we have to glance at the parties’ original nature, their present state and their …
In the Fall 1960 DISSENT, Irving Howe and Lewis Coser have aptly seized a political mood which is characteristic of many young Americans and offers the potentiality of a new upsurge of the idea of social protest. However, it is …
ON THERMONUCLEAR WAR, by Herman Kahn, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. Index. xx + 668 pp. “He was always sleepy. And always ready to sleep. Everywhere. At the biggest mass meetings, at all the concerts, at every important …
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 …
THE SPANISH CIVIL. WAR, by Hugh Thomas. Harper and Brothers. 1961. 720 pp. In broad outline, the popular view of the Spanish Civil War has not been disturbed by historical research. On the establishment of the Republic in 1931 successive …
Editors: I wish to compliment you on the Summer, 1961 issue of DISSENT. It is a constructive, revealing, often startling portrait of a city written by men and women who care about both its present and future. I was especially …
