December 1952
In This Issue
Explore the December 1952 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
New Books for Children
Accent on Living
Just Pick the Lock
The Camera Eye
Winter in Italy
Dragons
Record Reviews
Hong Kong
The Middle East
The Illusion of Power
“The really significant division in this age.”savs BARBARA ”is no longer better Right and Left, or pregressives and conservatives, or radicals and traditionalists. It is between those who. consciously or not. accept the new inhuman totalitarian order and those trim do not. In the following article Miss Ward, a leading Roman Catholic and formerly the Foreign Editor of the London Economist. traces the trends in the ff estern world which have shattered the dreams of Marxists, Liberals, and Conservatives alike.
A Lonely Lotus
Steel: The World's Guinea Pig
CLARENCE B. RANDALL has been with the Inland Steel Company since 1925, and since 1949 has been its President. He was invited by Paul Hoffman to be the Steel Consultant for ECA in its first year. This brought Mr. Randall into close association with the steel masters on the Continent and in Britain, and has enabled him to speak with more than usual authority for the American system of private enterprise. His book A Creed for Free Enterprise was published last summer under the Atlantic Little, Broun imprint.
Mahatma Gandhi
What first awakened Mahatma Gandhi to the humiliations imposed by their ”masters“ on “inferior" classes and races? The same problems which stirred Gandhi have long engaged BERTRAND RUSSELL,the English author, philosopher, and mathematician. Earl Russell, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, provides the third in our series dealing with the turning points that shaped the lives of famous men.
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington
The Sprained Ankle
Mother of three children and grandmother of two, BELLE F. WINESTINE began writing fifty years ago. After her graduation from the Unirersity of Wiscansin, she was a reporter on a daily Montana newspaper and then manager and editor of a weekly newspaper. I hare two un produced plays, she writes us, “an unpublished book, half a dozen unpublished children s books (written for my grandchildren), and scores of unpublished stories.”But here is one story the Atlantic is proud to publish.
The Gide-Claudel Letters
The friendship between Paul Claudel and André (side, which lasted for twenty-five years, was a friendship of advance and retreat, of attraction and repulsion. Claudel, the ardent Catholic, was intent on bringing Gide into the Church; and Gide, as will be seen, was strongly moved by his friend’s persuasion. But in the spring of 1914, Gide precipitated a crisis in which each man turned to the other in anguish of spirit and unsparing candor. Coolness and silence followed, and then, a quarter of a century later, shortly before Gide’s death, they agreed to the publication of the intimate letters which had passed between them. Pantheon Books, Inc., is bringing out an American edition from which we have selected a few of the most significant letters.
The Best Medicine for the Patient
Are the American people getting adequate medical care at a price they can afford? Speaking from the experience of twenty-seven years as a Professor of Clinical Medicine at Harvard University and Chief of the Medical Services at the Massachusetts General Hospital, DR. JAMES HOWARD MEANSevaluates the efforts of both doctors and laymen to meet the nation’s health needs. Atlantic readers will recall his articles ”England’s Public Medicine" (March, 1950) and “The Doctors Lobby ” (October, 1950). The role of government in the organization of medical services will be the subject of the next article by Dr. Means, in an early issue.
Good-Bye, Little Sister
CRARY MOORE is the pen name of a young Bllostonian who writes us, “I grew up on a farm, surrounded by horses, beagles, and French verbs — no people though. Remedied that by coming out in New York. Three years at Vassar, time off for good behavior, Worked for a seaweed company in New York, ambled around Europe, and retreated, in good order, to Boston. I like it here.”I he Atlantic published Miss Moore’s first story in May.
The Question in the Cobweb
Spain in Easy Lessons
This is the second of a pair of articles on Spain by ELLEIIY SEDGWICK,Editor of the Atlantic from 1908 to 1938. The Paradox of Spain appeared in the September issue. Mr. Sedgwick made his first extended visit to Spain in the year of the King’s abdication (1931). He went back again in 1937. this time in company with his friend Cameron Forbes, the former Governor General of the Philippines. And for the past three years he has spent the winter on the Peninsula, noting the contrasts and characteristics which have made Spain a special focus of American interest and controversy.
My Island Home
JAMES NORMAN HALL., who died in Tahiti on July 6, 1951, came close to achieving his heart’s desire. Born in Iowa and brought up in circumstances so modest that he had to work his wav through high school and college, he early acquired a wanderlust and the irrepressible urge to write. Though his poems and essays were rejected with grim monotony, he kept plugging away. Four years of social work in Boston brought him close to Thoreau and the Concord worthies, but it was his service in the First World War, first as a machine gunner in the British Army, then as an Ace in the Lafayette Flying Corps. that at last gave him the source material for the best of his early poems and his first two books, Kitchener’s Mob and High Adventure. The most audacious flyer in Rickenbacker’s squadron, Hall was shot down over the German lines; on his return from prison camp, he met in Paris the man who was to play the most decisive part in his literary life. Charles Nordhoff.
Dethronement
First in War, First in Peace
Author, editor, and Critic, RICHARD E. DANIELSON was for ten years the Editor of the Sportsman, and since 1940 has been President of The Atlantic Monthly Company. A lifelong student of George Washington, he gives us his thoughtful appraisal of the fifth volume in the spacious, intimately detailed biography now being written by our foremost Southern historian, Douglas Southall Freeman, whose definitive life of Robert E. Lee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1935 for the best American biography.
The Great Books
Born and schooled in France, JACQUES came to this country in 1919. He was naturalized in 1933 and is now Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author of several books, among them Teacher in America and the two-volume work Berlioz and the Romantic Century. His critical essays are well known to Atlantic readers, and he is a member of the editorial board of the Magazine of Art, the American Scholar, and the Columbia University Press.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Books: The Editors Like
Reader's Choice
The American Twenties: A Literary Panorama
A Stranger Came to the Farm
Rose and Crown
