April 1951
In This Issue
Explore the April 1951 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington
The United Nations
Survival Is Not Enough
WHITNEY GRISWOLD,who is serving his first year as the President of Yale University, came to his authority after being educated at Hotchkiss and at Yale and after long and varied teaching experience. He was director of army foreign area and civil affairs training programs during the last war, and has served more than ten years on three school boards. In the paper which follows he defines the crisis now facing every American college and university. He suggests a program for those boys who will want to study after their military service, and he tells us that survival will not be enough if we allow ourselves to became a colossus without education.
The Incorruptible Sinclair Lewis
Outward hound for a year of teaching at a number of European universities, PERRY MILLER, Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. encountered on the float a novelist whose work he had been discussing for many years — Sinclair Leuis. Their friendship sparked on sight and they saw much of each other during the last year of Mr. Letwis’s life. At Mr. Miller’s request. Mr. Lewis lectured at the University of Leiden, and it is against this foreign background that Mr. Miller has drawn this clear. unforgettable portrait.
The Strange Case of "The Miracle"
To what extant shall books, plays, and films be restricted in this country by what one or another religious group believes to be sacrilegious?The question has been posed directlv by the recent efforts of Catholic authorities in New York City to cause the withdrawal of an Italian film and to achieve a boycott of the theatre which, under a court injunction, persisted in showing it. BOSLEY CROWTHER, screen editor and critic of the New York Times since 1940 and a past chairman of the New York Film Critics,reports on a case which sets an important precedent involving censorship for theological reasons.
Canticle: To e.s
Israel
Why the Germans Hesitate
Professor of Government at Harvard University. CARL, J. FRIEDRICH was governmental adviser to General Clay during the early years of the Army of Occupation, and last summer he spent two months at the University of Heidelberg lecturing on political science and the problems of democracy. His classes were more than half composed of veterans of the Wehrmacht, and in the informal discussions outside the classroom, this is what they told him.
The Midnight Spinners
An American of Irish antecedents, JAMES REYNOLDS is an artist, sportsman, and country gentleman as much at home in Dablin as in Virginia. Like his grandmother before him, he is an expert on Irish ghosts; and on his recent return from Eire he stopped off at Boston to discuss with us a new series of ghost stories, of which this is the second to appear in the Atlantic. Meantime his first novel, The Grand Wide Way, published by the Creative Age Press, is meeting with a very favorable reception.
Can We Hold Down Prices?
SUMNER H. SLICHTER, Lamont University Professor at Harvard, has been rated by Fortune as “the best-known economist in the United States. He is the public’s economist, labor’s economist, and the businessman’s economist.”His forthcoming book. What’s Ahead for American Business, is predicated on the belief that our contest with Soviet Russia is primarily a contest of production. Events may plunge us into total mobilization, but short of that emergency Mr. Slichter believes that, if we are vigilant, we can build up our defenses and at the same time maintain a dynamic economy. One of our most immediate responsibilities, he argues. is to stop a runaway increase in prices.
The Orchestra That Played
The Man Who Fooled Hitler
A connoisseur of odd places and personalities. JOSEPH WECHSBERG has spent most of the past six years in writing about them from vantage points in Europe. From Vienna he sends this true account of a young locksmith’s apprentice who bestowed on himself enough bogus engineering honors to hoax successfully the Nazi army and bureaucracy alike. Mr. Wechsberg was born in Czechoslovakia and is now an American citizen; he is the author of a novel, Continental Touch, and several books about European travel.
Making a Bolt for It: Being Some Rejected Pages From an Autobiography
Not since the Brontës has an English family produced three such talented writers as Edith, Sachevcrell, and Sir Osbert Sitwell. The story of their home and heritage at Renishaw; the immortal portrait of their father, Sir George Sitwell; the account of their growing up in the Golden Age; the writers and artists who were their friends after the ordeal of the First World War — all this SIR OSBERT SITWELL has told in the five-volume autobiography which he wrote between 1943 and 1950, a work now humorous, now pensive, and always illuminating.
Romanticism in Chicago
Chicago has long hern interested in the decorative arts as ivell as in painting and sculpture. A Chicagoan who has been a stimulating force in the art world, DANIEL CATTON RICH, critic and author, has hern Director of the Art Institute of Chicago and its Curator of Painting since 1938. Ihis is the sixth of the Atlantics series on Painting and Sculpture to which connoisseurs, curators, and artists are contributing.
The Joy of Story-Telling: Constant Practice and Frequent Mistakes
I have ttltcavs been willing to take risks in order to do the work of story-telling, or even to hare the chance of doing it.”With these words JOHN MASEFIELD who has hern poet laureate of England since 1930. looks back across some sixty years to identify with lyric clarity those excitements and discouragements which he encountered as a youth. His elders disapproved of his voracious reading and when, in his second year as a Truining-Ship Cadet, he produced a prize essay he was told, “You must not let this be fatal to you. You must get this writing-rubbish out of your head. In this issue Mr. Masefield continues his description of the persons and influences that helped him as a free lance. His autobiography will be published in the near future by Macmillan.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Books: The Editors Like
Reader's Choice
The Riddle of Macarthur
The Short Story
Star Quality
Morning Journey
This Month
The Bicycle Thief
A native of Cleveland and a graduate of the University of Chicago, WALTER M. GIBB is a member of the staff of the Baltimore Sun.
Note to New Fathers
Mr. Master
DAVID MCCORD is widely known not only for his own poetry and light verse but also for his comprehensive anthology What Cheer.
High Fidelity Grows Up
JOHN M. CONLY is a former New York and Washington newspaperman who is now an associate editor of Pathfinder. “They Shall Have Music” is a quarterly feature in the Atlantic.
