When the cease-fire after eight years of war in Algeria was at last announced on March 17th, no sirens screamed in Paris, no anxious mothers fell down on their knees to pray in the streets, no crowds foregathered to burst …
Columbus Day 1961, the AFL—CIO Executive Council inadvertently brought on the birth pangs of a new American union movement. When the travail is over very few of the old-crony midwives who now run the AFL—CIO will be around, and almost …
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. …
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 …
As this issue is being completed, it appears that the Kennedy Administration has finally decided to resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere. This decision, leaked to the press after the Kennedy-MacMillan meeting in Bermuda, is to be carried out in …
We now have sufficient information confirming that the Chinese Communists have approached American officials and private exporters with proposals to buy large quantities of American surplus wheat and grains to feed China’s hungry millions. One such report states that China …
Democratic power springs from an enlightened electorate. The neglect of this possibility in America, the failure to protect and advance it with new form and content during a century and a half of expanding area and population, of complicating economy …
