April 1948
In This Issue
Explore the April 1948 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
I've Kept My Name
A forthright rebuttal to “I Changed My Name,” an anonymous article published in the February 1948 Atlantic
American in the Making
A native of New York City, son of Italian immigrants, FIORELLO H. LA GUARDIA spent his boyhood in Arizona, where his father was bandmaster of the 11th U.S. Infantry, and his early manhood in Fiume, where as our Consular Agent he continued the self-education which was to make him one of the most creative statesmen of our time. In this, the first of three installments drawn from his autobiography, which he did not live to finish, we see the unforgettable interaction between his youthful experience and his mature legislation. The autobiography, edited by M. R. Werner, will be published by Lippincott in May.
Spengler and Toynbee
Historian and political scientist, OWEN LATTIMORE is Director of the Page School of International Relations at the Johns Hopkins University. A native of one of Toynbee’s Civilizations. the Western, he is also naturalized in two others, that of China and that of the Steppe Nomads. He is one of the recognized authorities on the borderline between China and Russia, and his volumes of history and travel — Desert Road to Turkestan, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, and Mongol Journeys — afford him the perspective with which to appraise those two far-ranging historians of our time, Spengler and Toynbee.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Studies in Extinction
Reader's Choice
The Art of Judging Music
Painting in Public
Unclouded Summer
The Common Chord
Washington
The Leaf Shall Be Green
France
Correction
Air Power and World Peace
In July of last year, THOMAS K. FINLETTER was appointed by President Truman chairman of a temporary five-man commission to inquire into all phases of aviation and to aid in the drafting of a national air policy. The report of that commission, entitled “Survival in the Air Age,” is must reading for any conscientious citizen. Part of it, the belligerent part, has been played up in the press, but the recommendations looking towards peace, says the chairman, have been almost ignored. A New York lawyer, partner in Coudert Brothers, Mr. Finletter served as a special assistant to the Secretary of State from 1941 to 1944.
The Saddle
COURTENAY (Brick) TERRETT won his spurs as one of the great reporters and rewrite men on the New York Post, the Telegram, and the old World. His reports on the Snyder-Gray executions and the S-4 disaster at Provincetown are newspaper classics. From New York he went to Hollywood, then to Europe to write films and cover the war for International News Service. Now he has broken into the clear as a free lance. This is his first piece of fiction, and he is currently at work on a book on the Vigilante movement in Montana.
Sylvester the Bull
The son of an Ohio farmer, Louis BROMFIELDwent to Cornell in 1914 to study agriculture. It was the First It World War, in which he served as ambulance driver and liaison officer, which turned his thoughts to literature. His first four novels were written in France from his lovely place at Senlis. But in 1933, his book The Farm showed that his thoughts were returning to his home country in Ohio, and when in 1939 he bought his family home, it was with the incentive of revivifying the run-down, eroded acres which he has transformed into the fertile fields of Malabar Farm today. This is the first of two installments from his forthcoming book.
The Search for Atomic Control
As Deputy U.S. Representative on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, FREDERICK H. OSBORN has taken part in some of the most difficult deliberations since the war. He is well qualified for his responsibility. Graduating from Princeton in 1910, he entered an active business career which was interrupted by World War I. In 1928 he retired to devote himself to the advancement of the social sciences and became an authority on problems of population. In World War II he served as Chairman of the Civilian Committee on Selective Service, Brigadier General in Charge of Special Services, and Major General in Charge of Information and Education.
Greece
Russia, the u.s., and the Atom
During the one. hundred twenty-two sessions of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission it became clear to this foreign observer that the requirements of effective control are a threat to the maintenance of the Soviet regime and that the absence of control is a threat to the American way of life and economic structure as well as to the lives of millions. What is fundamental in this opposition, and how is it to be resolved?
The Hidden Soul
The most eminent philosopher in the English-speaking world, GEORGE SANTAYANA,now in his eighty-fifth year, is living in Rome and writing with vigor and sapience. This is the second of his three new Dialogues, which it is the Atlantic’s privilege to publish in successive issues this spring. Each contains passages characteristic of Santayana at his best; each reflects his sense of detachment from his own time, or any particular time, and his critical and contemplative devotion to truth as he sees it, regardless of age, war, or climate.
A Deal in Cards
For decades children have been collecting cards — cards with the college seals, cards with baseball players and pugilists, or just ordinary playing cards. It is one of their forms of wealth, and what happens when these cards fall into the hands of a young monopolist is told in this story by DANIEL CURLEY, who has worked as a welder in the Fore River and New Orleans shipyards and who is now teaching English at Syracuse University.
Winds Along the Dunes
A member of a Massachusetts family long identified with Boston and Cape Cod, WYMAN RICHARDSON with his wife and children has spent many of his happiest hours in the rustic Farm House which gives them access to the sea and the Nauset Marsh and Beach. expeditions in the open depend on weather, and Dr. Richardson knows the wind as a weather-breeder, as a stimulant, and as an almost personal adversary.
Now That Lost April..
Have We an Intelligence Service?
Does this country need a highly trained and skillfully integrated Intelligence Service in peace as in war? Does such an Intelligence Service exist? Or has the mood of economy, of relaxation, and the “now it can be told” gossip reduced us to that vulnerable state in which we went to sleep before Pearl Harbor? These are a few of the pointed questions answered by a writer who served in Intelligence during the war.
The Country That Can Feed the World?
“The misuse of forests, grasslands, wild life, and water sources in the United States is the most violent and the most destructive story in the long history of civilization,” says FAIRFIELD OSBORN. Are we to continue on the same dusty, perilous road once traveled to its dead end by other mighty nations? Can we, among other things, tolerate assaults on our public lands at the very time when we are trying to feed the world? President of the New York Zoological Society, Mr. Osborn is leading the drive for conservation on a national scale. His new book, Our Plundered Planet, will be published by Little, Brown this spring.
Arabesque
In 1941 Armande Herne, the attractive wife of a British petty officer in the Atlantic service, finds herself the object of considerable suspicion in Syria. Half French and bilingual, she had come to Beirut as the secretary to an aircraft manufacturer. But when his mission collapsed mid the British and Free French took over, she was without visible means of support. Her British passport was only a partial defense against the suspicion of British Field Security, represented here by the persistent Sergeant Prayle.
This Month
The Far East
Step Off the Gas
THE most widely read living author of mystery fiction, whose total book sales have passed the 28-million mark, ERLE STANLEY GARDNER is an amateur of the outdoors. He is an archer, woodsman, and hunter, and his home at Rancho del Paisano at Temecula, California, is one of the most picturesque in the West.
Sky Scraper
Tourist in Peru
RAY JOSEPHS has spent many years in Latin America as a newspaper correspondent. This report comes from his travels there last winter.
On Seeing Phoebe in a Bus Queue
How Cool Is a Cucumber?
AUTHOR, with his wife Margery, of various oddities in the field of natural science which first appeared in the Atlantic and which were recently published in book form, LORUS J. MILNE is a teacher, biologist, and biophysicist in the Department of Zoology at the University of Vermont.
Smoke Without Fire
GILES PLAYFAIR is a former London barrister now living in New Canaan, Connecticut. He is the author of a biography of Edmund Kean and of Singapore Goes Off the Air, an account of his war experiences as Productions Director of the Malaya Broadcasting Corporation.
The Death of Dunbar's Cat
The Red and the Black
When W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM was asked to select and edit the ten best novels in world literature, he chose three novels from France, two from Russia, one from America, and four from England, and for each book he wrote an introduction. His appraisal of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary we printed in November, his essay on Fielding and Tom Jones in December; in January he discussed Balzac and Le Père Goriot, in February the Brontës and Wuthering Heights, and in March Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov. The set of the Ten Best Novels will be published by the John C. Winston Company.
