“While we were making the world safe for democracy in one war and destroying Hitler’s master race theory in another, the Negro rode in the back of the bus, lived in a ghetto across the railroad tracks, sent his children to Jim Crow schools.”
KEN W. PURDY, formerly editor of ARGOSY, TRUE, unit PARADE, is now free-lancing. His book, KINGS OF THE ROAD, was published by Atlantic-Little, Brown in 1952.
In 1921 NORA WALN, a Quaker brought up in the Grampian Hills of Pennsylvania, became the adopted daughter of an ancient family then dwelling in their large cantonment known as the House of Exile in Hopei Province.She lived within the family walls for more than two years, an experience which she recaptured in her oft-printed took, THE HOUSE OF EXILE, and during her days there she made friends with a blind ballad singer whose art and whose fate in Red China she now depicts.
The author of several books, including AMERICAN CAPITALISM, A THEORY OF PRICE CONTROL, and THE GREAT CRASH, 1929, JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH is professor of economics at Harvard. He spent his boyhood on the Canadian border close to Detroit and within range of the legends which have overlaid the stubborn genius of Henry Ford.
In the course of doing research for her various biographies, CATHERINE DKINKER BOWEN of Philadelphia has read in libraries as far West from her home as California and as far East as Leningrad. Over the years she has kept working notes on the libraries and librarians whom she has known, and the paper which has emerged from this source we think happily appropriate for the celebration of National Library Week, March 16-22.
In comic art, decorations, and covers, Harold W. Ross proceeded to lay down as many new standards in his budding magazine, the NEW YORKER, as he was achieving at the same time in other areas of journalism. In this fifth part of his series JAMES THURBER takes us into the Tuesday afternoon “art meeting,” at which Ross and his staff settled such questions as how a seal’s whiskers should be drawn, and many other issues great and small.
Executive secretary of the National Association for the advancement of Colored People, HOY WILKINS,who graduated from the Universdy of Minnesota, teas for fifteen years editor of THE CRISISand prior to that, from 1923 to 1931, managing editor of THE CALL,the Negro weekly of Kansas City. In this article he carries forth the discussion initiated by Agnes Meyer in her January article, “Race and the Schools.”
Born and reared in Chicago, RICHARD BAUM attended Harvard, served in France and Germany as S-2 (intelligence and reconnaissance) of an infantry battalion and, since the war, has item trying to get his fool in the door as a writer.
A widely read novelist whose avocation is criminology, ERLE STANLEY GARDNER believes that the strengthening of our parole system would be the most effective and least expensive method of controlling crime. Confining prisoners for excessive terms, he argues, is as bad as releasing them without further supervision.
JOHN J. TEAL, JR., is an authority on the arctic, where his attention has been drawn to the musk ox, that huge docile animal with its silken fleece which has been hunted almost to extinction. The musk ox survives in a natural state only in the uninhabited regions of arctic North America and Greenland, and there Mr. Teal successfully captured the young herd which he is seeking to domesticate on his farm in Vermont.
An American of Irish antecedents, JOHN V. KELLEHER has become an authority on Irish history and the Irish mind in the years of study that have brought him to his present professorship at Harvard.
My daughter-in-law is a wonderful young woman, but we do not see eye to eye on anything.
The trouble started soon after she and my son became engaged. Before the engagement, she acted like she wanted to be my new best friend or for me to be her “surrogate mom.” As soon as she had a ring, the switch flipped! She found fault with everything I said or did, and had my son call me and correct me for her, to the point of asking me to change my outward appearance and mode of clothing to suit her idea of how I should behave. According to her, via my son, I didn’t dress appropriately for my age, 50ish. So now I buy my clothes two sizes too big, and have sworn off glitter, rhinestones, and sequins, even though I love sparkly clothing. I have also toned down my otherwise sedate makeup routine.
In the face of government inaction, the country’s best chance at keeping the crisis from spiraling relies on everyone to keep caring.
In 2018, while reporting on pandemic preparedness in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I heard many people joking about the fictional 15th article of the country’s constitution: Débrouillez-vous, or “Figure it out yourself.” It was a droll and weary acknowledgment that the government won’t save you, and you must make do with the resources you’ve got. The United States is now firmly in the débrouillez-vous era of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Across the country, almost all government efforts to curtail the coronavirus have evaporated. Mask mandates have been lifted on public transit. Conservative lawmakers have hamstrung what public-health departments can do in emergencies. COVID funding remains stalled in Congress, jeopardizing supplies of tests, treatments, and vaccines. The White House and the CDC have framed COVID as a problem for individuals to act upon—but action is hard when cases and hospitalizations are underestimated, many testing sites have closed, and rose-tinted CDC guidelines downplay the coronavirus’s unchecked spread. Many policy makers have moved on: “We’re heading into the midterms, and I think there’s a real desire to show confidence that they’ve solved this,” Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease specialist and the editor at large for public health at Kaiser Health News, told me.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths, from either tobacco or the pandemic, could be prevented with a single behavioral change.
It’s suddenly become acceptable to say that COVID is—or will soon be—like the flu. Such analogies have long been the preserve of pandemic minimizers, but lately they’ve been creeping into more enlightened circles. Last month the dean of a medical school wrote an open letter to his students suggesting that for a vaccinated person, the risk of death from COVID-19 is “in the same realm, or even lower, as the average American’s risk from flu.” A few days later, David Leonhardt said as much to his millions of readers in the The New York Times’ morning newsletter. And three prominent public-health experts have called for the government to recognize a “new normal” in which the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus “is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses that include influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more.”
The great “convergence” of the mid-20th century may have been an anomaly.
It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”
The pro-life movement needs to know that such culture wars result not in outright victory for one side but in reaction and compromise.
The culture war raged most hotly from the ’70s to the next century’s ’20s. It polarized American society, dividing men from women, rural from urban, religious from secular, Anglo-Americans from more recent immigrant groups. At length, but only after a titanic constitutional struggle, the rural and religious side of the culture imposed its will on the urban and secular side. A decisive victory had been won, or so it seemed.
The culture war I’m talking about is the culture war over alcohol prohibition. From the end of Reconstruction to the First World War, probably more state and local elections turned on that one issue than on any other. The long struggle seemingly culminated in 1919, with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and enactment by Congress of the National Prohibition Act, or the Volstead Act (as it became known). The amendment and the act together outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States and all its subject territories. Many urban and secular Americans experienced those events with the same feeling of doom as pro-choice Americans may feel today after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
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