Winter 2026

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 …

When FDR came to Washington in 1933 he was accompanied by dashing young economists and social scientists ready to remake the government, if not the world. Many were fresh from Columbia University, and quite unlike the Harvard—MIT contingent that now …

It is a long time now since craftsmen in the trade regarded with amusement any statements suggesting that publishing was a business—publishers had considered themselves gentlemen, not businessmen, and their declared concern had been with art, not commerce. But that …

For a full decade now—for a span of years that is gradually coming into focus as a historical epoch in its own right—the major countries of Western Europe have been living under conservative rule. This situation has created new and …

The letters column of the July ’61 number of Mad comics under the banner, “A Mad State of Affairs,” features a photograph of the daughter of the governor of North Carolina smilingly enthroned in bed with a batch of Mads. …

The German voters have expressed their dissatisfaction with the foreign policy of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer whom. the socialist leader Dr. Schumacher once, in a premeditated rash of nationalist anger dubbed “the Chancellor of the Allies.” The Socialist vote increased by …

One of the first things to strike an outsider about San Francisco is the respect and esteem in which longshoremen are held by the rest of the community. They are good credit risks; they are homeowners (yes, some have swimming …

Twelve years ago in his book, The Vital Center, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. presented materials for a new-style liberalism which has remained the basis of his politics to this day. It is clear that Schlesinger was not using the term “center” …

There is more than manner and know-how in Mr. George Kennan’s urbane style; he also is a nineteenth-century statesman, and his political wisdom comes from the school of Castlereagh and Talleyrand. He does not just disagree with this or that …

Should a Socialist society be a single, or a multi-cultural, society? Is there an entity called Socialist culture which is the proper culture of a Socialist society, or, on the other hand, is it a mark of a Socialist society …

If the future of the Communist Party seems dim, there have been some developments in the United States these past few years that should encourage those who believe the Soviet Union represents a force for historic progress. Among the disorganized …