Willi Paul Adarns
The enduring image of America as a "melting pot" was stamped on the national consciousness the English Zionist Israel Zangwill in 1908, when his simple-minded melodrama, The Melting Pot, opened in Washington and New York. The play featured two Russian immigrants, a Jew, and a Christian, who found love and happiness in America-America, "God's cruci- ble, the great melting pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!" Expertly larded with bathos...
The enduring image of America as a "melting pot" was stamped on the national consciousness by the English Zionist Israel Zangwill in 1908, when his simple-minded melodrama, The Melting Pot, opened in Washington and New York. The play featured two Russian immigrants, a Jew, and a Christian, who found love and happiness in America-America, "God's cruci- ble, the great melting pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!" Expertly larded with bathos and cliche,...
is concerned, there has long existed a conflict in the United States between (at its emotional extremes) the starry-eyed idealists and the hard-hearted xenophobes, be- tween the Pollyannas and the Chicken Littles. Does the current wave of new arrivals represent a serious threat? Is the situation out of control?
Some Americans clearly think so. "In the 19th century," former Ambassador Clare Booth Luce observed last year, "the United States absorbed 40 million immigrants. But the...
to the United States. "Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history."
Handlin, a reigning figure in the field, has written or edited numerous works on immigration, among them
Immigration as a Factor in Ameri-can History (Prentice-Hall, 1965, out of print) and a study of Boston's Im- migrants (Harvard, 1959, cloth & paper). Other general works: Philip Taylor's Distant Magnet (Harper, 1972, paper only) and Maldwyn Allen Jones's American Immigration (Univ. of Chicago,...
public agencies and private institutions
"Retooling the American Work Force: Toward a National Training Strategy."
Northeast-Midwest Institute, Box 37209, Washington, D.C. 20013. 50 pp. $5.00.
Author: Pat Choate Low capital investment, poor man-agement, and a fading technological lead are often blamed for poor U.S. economic performance. Often over-looked is an obvious factor: the educa- tion and skills of American workers. Choate, a senior analyst at TRW, Inc., notes that such neglect...
Summaries ofkey reportsgiven at recent Wilson Center meetings
"The State and America's Higher Civil Service."
Paper Hugh Heclo, presented at a Wilson Center conference sponsored by the Wilson Center's American Societv and Politics Program, October 23-24, 1982.
Michael J. Lacey, moderator In Western Europe and Japan, power- ful senior civil servants are a perma- nent feature of government. The United States, however, has no com- parable "higher civil service." Washington do...
Rousseau has returned in recent acutely aware today of problems that
years to public esteem. Between the Rousseau in the 18th century was
two World Wars, he was condemned almost alone in discerning.
by Right and Left alike, seen as the This renewed popularity has its
forerunner at once of fascism and of negative aspect: There is a danger of
communism, an enemy of science Rousseau's being transformed again
and of reason, responsible for both from a philosopher into an ideo-
the excesses...
residential Images
It is a rare week on American television when viewers do not get at least a 20-second voice-and-picture glimpse of the Man in the Oval Office, and a rare night when they do not see the White House at least as a backdrop for a TV correspondent's brief " stand-upper" on the President's doings that day. All this has encouraged new notions in Washington of the power and im- portance of the "presidential image" in assuring the man's popularity and ability to...
Thomas E. Cavanagh, in Political Science Quarterly (Winter 1982/83), 2852 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10025-0148.
During the 1970s, a crop of eager newcomers dramatically overhauled the US. House of Representatives. The result, says Cavanagh, a Joint Center for Political Studies researcher, has been "institutional chaos."
Earlier, between 1863 and 1963, the House had become increasingly institutionalized: The average tenure of members rose from 1.75 to 5.65 terms; the proportion of freshmen...
Leonard
The Bureaucracy Reed, in Harper's (Nov. 1982), Subscrip- tion Service Dept., P.O. BOX 2620, BOU~-
Wins Again der, Colo. 80321.
President Jimmy Carter's 1978 Civil Service Reform Act was hailed as a
major overhaul of the federal bureaucracy. But Reed, a Washington
Monthly contributing editor, says the reforms have changed little.
The U.S. Civil Service, established under the 1883 Pendleton Act, has become an increasingly secure haven even for incompetent employees. In 1974, the Supreme...