April 1949
In This Issue
Explore the April 1949 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Indonesia
Playing Down the Bomb: Blackett Versus the Atom
I. I. RABI, head of the Physics Department at Columbia and a member of the General Advisory Committee for the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, received the Nobel Prize in 1944 for his work in atomic physics. Here he attacks the case argued by P. M. S. Blackett, the British physicist, who was an operational analyst during the war and a Nobel Prize winner last year. The issues involve our fifteen-billion-dollar budget for defense, our American understanding of atomic warfare, and the nature of our relationship with Soviet Russia.
Return Trip to the Stone Age
A novelist who scored first with his stories of Mr. Moto and then with his satires of New England, The Late George Apley (1937; awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1938), Wick ford Poinl (1939), H. M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), and whose latest novel, Point of No Return, is just off press, JOHN P. MARQUAND during the war was flown a good many thousand miles in the South Pacific as an unofficial observer for Secretary Stimson. Eighteen months ago he landed briefly at Truk, the so-called Japanese Gibraltar, and his picture of the islands we left behind us is one not easily erased from mind.
How's Business in Russia?
Economist, soldier, and author, Lieutenant Colonel JOHN BAKER WHITE has been a member of Parliament from the Canterbury division of Kent since 1945. Director of the Economic League, 1926-1945. he was a specialist in the study of German rearmament; he represented Britain at a number of international conferences in Geneva during the long armistice, and is the author of Red Russia Arms, A Soldier Dares to Think, and The Soviet Spy System.
My Only and Last Love: Byron's Unpublished Letters to Countess Teresa Guiccioli
Byron’s letters to Countess Guiccioli, held in private by her family for seventy-jive years, have now been released. Sympathetically edited byMARCHESA IRIS OUTGO,the letters and the day-to-day account of this extraordinary love affair will be published by Scribner’s in May under the title Byron: The Last Attachment, for permission to publish the letters, the Marchesa is indebted to Count Carlo Gamba and to the Legal Personal Representative of Lord Byron’s estate. This is the second installment of the Vtlan tic’s abridgment.
Scandinavia
Tyrants of Television: An Inside View
Vice-President in charge of Television for the American Broadcasting Company, CHARLES C. BARRY has grown up in the broadcasting industry. He has had a hand in a number of radio innovations, among them the development of high-fidelity transcription broadcasts; he was one of the first to insist on the sale of radio time for both sides of a controversial issue; and (whisper this) he was the man responsible for broadcasting “Stop the Music.”From 1946 to 1948. Mr. Barry was in charge of radio and television programing for ABC; now he supervises all the television activities of the network.
Sonnets for April
Man Out of Darkness: Religion Has Not Lost Its Power
In “Man Against Darkness” (September. 1948 Atlantic) Professor H. T. Stace of Princeton University argued that modern science, by destroying “the old comfortable picture of a friendly universe governed hr spiritual values” and by putting in its place the picture of “a purposeless and meaningless universe,” has killed the “essential religious spirit in our civilization. THEODORE M. GREENE,Professor of Philosophy and Master of Silliman College in Yale University, analyzes Dr. Stave s position and offers at the same time a constructive argument in support of critical religious faith.
The Rescuers
A Scotsman who was brought up in the country and who married a Canadian just before the war, DAVID WALKER served in the regular army (The Black Watch). He was taken prisoner with the Highland Division in 1910 (he escaped a bit but never got as far as a frontier), and in 1946 went to India as Comptroller to the Viceroy, Lord Waved. He began writing when he retired from the army in 1947, and is now living in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. His first novel, which is about the Highlands, will be published later this year by Houghton Mifflin.
Japan Is Nobody's Ally
One of our lending authorities on Far Eastern affairs, OWEN LATTIMORE has spent more than two decades traveling in and writing about China, Japan, and the border territories between China and Russia. In 1941 and 1942 he served as adviser to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and on his return became Deputy Director of OWI in charge of the Far Eastern Division. Today he directs the Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins. The risk we run in trying to make Japan “the workshop of Asia” is told unsparingly in this chapter from his new book. The Situation in Vsia, appearing this month under the Atlantic-Little, Drown imprint.
Coins
The Survivor
Griffin
The Brave Bulls
Luis Bello, the Mexican matador known an “the Swordsman of Guerreras.” is a tired man though still in his early thirties. For years he has supported a large, lazy clan of relatives, paying for their fat with Ins own flesh. In the plane to the Capital where he will fight in the Plaza Mexico, his thoughts are on Undo de Calderon who he believes will comfort him. He is right.
Lyre and Laurel: Goethe: 1749-1949
Essayist and humanist, LUCIEN PRICE is the author of We Northmen, Winged Sandals, and Litany for All Souls, and an editorial writer for the Boston Globe whose thinking has been vital to New England for three decades. Loyal readers of the Atlantic will remember “Olympians in Homespun” (1926) and “Hardscrabble Hellas” (1927), two idyls in lyric prose of life in the Western Reserve of Ohio.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Reader's Choice
A Study of Literature for Readers and Critics
America Through British Eyes
Lucifer With a Book
University Bookshelf
Washington
This Month
Monaco
This is one of several travel articles which JOSEPH WECHSBERG has provided for Atlantic readers from a recent leisurely tour of Europe.
Sanctuary
Have You a Fire Stick, Please?
FREDERICK PACKARD resumed writing and editorial work in New York after serving in the Psychological Warfare Branch of Allied Force Headquarters. This is his second appearance in the Atlantic.
