September 1949
In This Issue
Explore the September 1949 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Mr. Churchill
Isaiah Berlin defends Churchill against the charge that his writings are windy and self-aggrandizing
I'd Rather Catch
A New Hampshire Yankee, George (Birdie) Tebbetts of the Boston Red Sox has been voted by the fans the most popular catcher in the American League, and this is his thirteenth year of major league baseball. After forty-four months in the Army Air Forces he returned to the diamond rusty and, some thought, past his peak. But he has made a remarkable recovery, and today there is no keener, quicker mind behind the plate. Off season, Mr. Tebbetts is associated with the Paul Sadler Insurance Agency of Nashua, New Hampshire.
Argentina
Conflict on the Waterfront
Labor and business leaders throughout the nation have much to gain, we believe, from this account of the transformation of labor relations on the West Coast waterfront. It shows what has happened since the longshoremen and employers, after years of strikes and lockouts, decided to get along together. CLARK KERR is Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, and served as Impartial Chairman. Pacific Coast Waterfront, in 1946-1947. LLOYD FISHER,who collaborated in the writing, is an Associate Professor in the University’s Political Science Department.
Young John Adams: On the Road to Philadelphia
In Yankee from Olympus CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN showed us the decisiveness of that Great Dissenter, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. For the past three years she has been working on a comparable portrait of young John Adams, who was brought up to believe in British rights and British freedom and who in his maturity, from 1760 to 1775, worked to effect a new freedom on this side of the Atlantic. Those fifteen years were the most important, the most dynamic, of John Adams’s life. From the final section of Miss Bowen's book we gain a fresh. firm understanding of American liberty under the law. This is the first of five installments.
Quite a Beach
Artist and novelist, TOM LEA is a native Texan who studied mural painting under John Norton of Chicago.He has been supporting himself by his painting ever since he was nineteen. In his assignments as a war artist and correspondent for Life (1941 to 1945). he covered more than 100.000 miles outside the United States,and at Peleliu he became the first combat artist to go in with the initial assault of an invasion. His first novel, The Brave Bulls, has been high on the best-seller lists ever since its publication last April.
Washington
Are the Foreign Films Better?
The success in America of foreign films like Henry V, The Red Shoes, Symphonie Pastorale, The Baker’s Wife, Open City, and Brief Encounter shows beyond question that the movies are not only a mass medium: wordof-mouth advertising has attracted adults in increasing number to theaters which make a specialty of “non-habit” pictures. This new factor, argues GILBERT SELDES,should be taken seriously by our five major studios, which have too long been committed to ”the manufacture of average pictures for average runs.”
California's Next Hundred Years
Land of milk and honey, land of timber, rich valleys, oil and minerals, California has survived some rough usage since the forty-niners first took over. How good are her chances for the future? For the answer, we turn to MAX STERN, a newspaperman tong resident in San Francisco, who has been since 1944 the Regional In formation Officer for the Bureau of Reclamation. Department of the Interior, with headquarters in Sacramento.
Martins
Puss
Jackdaw
The Unpredictable Trout
As a young man making his mark in Vickers Ltd., JOHN E. HUTTON found the time and the boundless enthusiasm for two hobbies: automobile racing (as an amateur) and fly-fishing. Now, in his maturity, he looks back over five decades of fishing in the chalk streams of England, in the Irish lakes, and in Scotland, New Zealand, and the famous rivers of Canada. His forthcoming book Trout and Salmon Fishing (which will appear on September 20 under the Atlantic-Little, Brown imprint) provides a helping hand, wisdom, and a fund of superb stories for anyone who enjoys fishing. From it we have drawn the paper which follows.
Frisbie of the South Seas
Robert Dean Frisbie went to Tahiti in 1920, a young veteran of the First World War drawing a veteran’s disability pension because of his weak lungs. It was his intent to submerge himself in the slow, delightful current of the island life, just as it was his aspiration to write books of escape. But he tens often at odds with himself and sometimes in difficulties with the white authorities. It was Frisbie’s good fortune to become fast friends with JAMES NORMAN HALL, and the friendship served him as a beacon in the dark days after the death of his native wife, Nga. when Frisbie found himself alone with the care of their children. The story of this friendship, so sympathetically told by Mr. Hall, is being published in three installments, of which this is the second.
Katherine Mansfield in France
The trugic details of Katherine Mansfield’s illness are only hinted at in her letters and journal. We are indebted to her husband, JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY,for this fuller understanding of the writer as she was during the First World War, in France — lonely and cut off from her friends in England. In the midst of her illness and grieving over the death of her brother, she was given a new lease of life by a timid, elderly Englishman who lives again in these heretofore unpublished letters to her husband.
Elsa Triolet
Of English parentage, MONICA STIRLING spent her girlhood in Paris, where her father directed the English Theater. In the early years of the war she returned to London to work for the Free French, and after the Allied invasion she went back to France as correspondent for the Atlantic. Her articles and short stories brought her a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer award for a year’s writing in Italy. Miss Stirling's first novel, Lovers Aren’t Company, has just been published under the Atlantic-Little, Brown imprint.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Atomic Energy
Reader's Choice
A Night at the Airport
Gardens of China
Image and Idea
Lead, Kindly Light
Inherit the Night
The Valley Road
This Month
Cruising Cook
A yachtsman who served as a naval officer in both world wars, ALEXANDER W. MOFFAT is the author of Galley Guide. Since it was first published in this handbook on cruising cookery has run through eighteen printings and its sales have increased each year.
Three Dollars a Day
T. E. DOREMUS is a former newspaperman, author of various travel articles, who is summering in France. His novel, Flaw Dexter, was published in 1947.
For the Book of Crows
French Wartime Vintages
For many years consultant on nines to S. S. Pierce Co., CHARLES R. CODMAN knows the products of the European and California vineyards from direct experience mulched by few other experts. In the October Atlantic he will report on the wines of the Loire.
Perspective
My First Millionairies
LORNA SLOCOMBE runs her own business, a taping agency, in Harrard Square, Cambridge. This is her third appearance in the Atlantic.
