October 1948
In This Issue
Explore the October 1948 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
The Museum of the Future
It was after several visits to the National Gallery in Washington to see the paintings from the Berlin galleries that WALTER LIPPMAN, made newly aware of the inaccessibility of most great works of art, reached these conclusions about the museum of the future. This paper is the substance of an address delivered at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums
The Philippines
Reader's Choice
Our Gifted Son
Bridie Steen
The Last of the Conquerors
Washington Witch Hunt
The White Goddess
Sheridan: His Life and His Theatre
This Month
Dominica
Author of many travel books, especially on New England and the West Indies, ELEANOR EARLY lives in New York and vacations in the tropics. Her last book was New Orleans Holiday; her next will be New York Holiday.
The Spoils
The Street Called Solitude
A Londoner long a citizen of the United States, A. HAMILTON GIBBS is the author of many books and stories.
Mexican Guide
MALCOLM LAPRADE, familiar to radio listeners for many years as “The Man from Cook’s,” has traveled in all parts of the world. In this article he gives a Mexican view of a sport which most Americans deplore.
The Golden Age
Building Boom
RAY JOSEPHS spends the greater part of each year in Latin America and is a frequent contributor to Accent on Living.
Washington
Mexico
No Place to Hide: What the Bomb Did at Bikini
The light carrier Independence survived the two atomic bombs at Bikini and when she was towed back to San Francisco men saw that she was still afloat. Actually she was a dangerous leper,so full of radioactivity that she could not even be used for scrap. Now we hear of plans for a super-carrier and the question arises as to whether we comprehend the lesson learned by a few at Bikini.DAVID BRADLEY,a graduate of the Harvard Medical School,had six months of training in the Manhattan District prior to the Tests. His Log,passed by the Office of Information Control of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, tells a story every American should know.
The Democrats Can Win
ELLIS G. ARNALL was Governor of Georgia, his native state, from 1943 to 1947; in those four years, he restored the prestige of the state university, put through the repeal of the poll tax, fought the Klan in the open, and worked unceasingly to diversify the agriculture of the land he loved so well. A leading Democrat, who speaks his mind with courage and candor, he is the author of The Shore Dimly Seen and What the People Want, and the logical choice for the third in our series of articles on the coming election. Gardner Jackson’s article on Henry A. Wallace appeared in the Atlantie for August, and Oren Root’s article, on the Republican Revival, in September.
White Man Returns
A tall, slender Californian happily married to Harry Keith, the Conservator of Forests and Director of Agriculture of North Borneo, AGNES NEWTON KEITH is the author of two books: Land Below the Wind, which won the Atlantic Nonfiction Prize in 1939, and Three Came Home, the story of her captivity as a Japanese prisoner of war with her young son George. When Mrs. Keith returned to the States in 1946, she weighed eighty-seven pounds, her arm had been broken, her ribs kicked in. A year later, she and George went back to North Borneo to stand by Harry in the bitter toil of reconstruction.
Mark Twain's River
DIXON WECTER has succeeded Bernard DeVoto as Literary Editor of the Mark Twain estate. In August of last year he and his wife made the trip by riverboat down the Mississippi with Mark’s pilot book to help him pick up some of the old landmarks. Now he is back at his desk in the Huntington Library, where as Chairman of the Research Group he will continue his editing of the letters and papers of Mark Twain.
Education in an Armed Truce
Chemist, writer, and university president, JAMES BRYANT CONANTof Harvard is faced, as is every college administrator, with the problems imposed by the armed truce in which we live. The effect of inflation on American education can be measured in teachers’ salaries and in overcrowded classrooms. The effect of Universal Military Training can be forecast and it need not inevitably lead, as some say, to war. The clear and affirmative statement which follows has been drawn from President Conant’s forthcoming book, Education in a Divided World, which is to be published this autumn by the Harvard University Press.
London
Tolstoy in Soviet Hands
The son of a Siberian peasant, MIKHAIL KORIAKOV won his spurs as a Soviet journalist and literary critic while still in his thirties. But because of barbed-wire political entanglements which sometimes impede a writer in the Soviet Union, in 1939 he sought to bury himself as a ' “brain worker“ on the Tolstoy Estate at Yasnaya Polyana. During the war Mr. Koriakov took part in the defense of Moscow, and later was made military correspondent to the General Staff, an assignment which took him to every sector of the 2000-mile Russian front. After the war he escaped from the Soviet Embassy in Paris and came to Brazil, where he wrote I’ll Never Go Back.
Three Houses
Once Only
An Irish poet, author, and surgeon, OLIVER ST. JOHN GOGARTY is almost as much at home in America as in Ireland. A gay, dynamic figure who pilots his own plane and loves archery, Dr. Gogarly was a fellow student with James Joyce and, so legend has it, the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. He first unlatched our affections with his witty semi-autobiography, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, which appeased in 1937.
"Kitty" of Harvard
The most eminent Shakespearean of his day, George Lyman Kittredge ruled the English Department as he ruled his classes at Harvard, with an iron hand and cold blue eyes which could spark when the occasion arose. Never a Ph.D. himself, he did more to train and temper the steel of Ph.D.’s than any other educator in the East. His fire, his challenge, and his encouragement will not soon be forgotten. We have called on ROLLO WALTER BROWN, one of his students, for this picture of ”Kitty" in action.
"I Personally" Awards
Laughter in the Next Room
As a Captain in the Grenadier Guards, Osbert Sitwell came unscathed through the heavy fighting in Flanders, and with the final victory in 1918 he, his sister Edith, and his younger brother Sacheverell turned to the arts with a new sense of release and opportunity.
Marcel Proust
One of the most gifted critics and teachers of our day, HARRY LEVIN is a Professor of English and Chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. In earlier issues he has written for us on James Joyce and other moderns: this fresh evaluation of Marcel Proust will serve as an invitation to new readers and as the introduction to The Letters of Marcel Proust, Edited and Translated by Mina Curtiss, a volume which is to be published by Random House this winter.
The Taste of Angels
An art and director who received his training at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, JAMES S. PLAUT resumed his duties as Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, after four years’ service in the Navy. As Director of the Art Looting Investigation Unit, OSS, he was responsible for uncovering the works of art collected by Rosenberg, Göring, and Hitler and hidden in Germany.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
