Summer 1978
Popular Culture
In Essence
MichaelVoting On Nelson, in The Nation (Feb. 25, 1978), 333 the Issues Sixth Ave., New York, N.Y., 10014.
At a time when the American public is said to be "turned off" from government and "dropping out" of politics, use of the initiative, which citizens can propose laws and have them voted up or down in general elections, is on the rise at the state and local level. Nelson, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, suggests that the time for extending the initiative idea...
Bruce Adams,
in National Civic Review (Jan. 1978), 47 E.
68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
The U.S. Supreme Court decisions of the mid-1960s requiring periodic reapportionment-the decennial division of states into legislative dis- tricts for voting purposesÃ?â??o the basis of "one person, one vote" elimi- nated the gross population inequalities among legislative districts.
However, "the reapportionment revolution remains unfi...
Bruce Adams,
in National Civic Review (Jan. 1978), 47 E.
68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
The U.S. Supreme Court decisions of the mid-1960s requiring periodic reapportionment-the decennial division of states into legislative dis- tricts for voting purposesÃ?â??o the basis of "one person, one vote" elimi- nated the gross population inequalities among legislative districts.
However, "the reapportionment revolution remains unfi...
monitoring all zoning to bar exclusionary schemes or forcing communities to permit a certain amount of low-rent housing as a condition for admitting new industry. States could also agree to absorb all or part of the cost of facilities required by new residents.
"James Madison: The Unimperial Presi- dent" by Ralph Ketcham, in Virginia as Quarterly Review (Winter 1978), Univer-
sity of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.
22903.
No constitutional issue more consumed James Madison than that...
giving Mr. Madison men and money?" asked Gouverneur Morris, former minister to France. Faced with obstructions to recruiting, tax-collecting, and the movement of troops, Madison, like later Presidents, believed that domestic discontent was "the greatest, if not the sole, inducement with the enemy to persevere."
Unlike some later Presidents, however, Madison refused to crack down on dissent, believing that to do so would be "to 'lose' the war waging it incongruously"-by...
~eanneBell Nicholson and ~ebra
W. Stewart, in Publius (Winter 1978), Center for the Study of Federalism, Tem- ple University, Philadelphia, Pa. 19122.
On June 20, 1977, the Supreme Court held that states were not required to subsidize elective abortions as a condition to receiving Medicaid funds and that state laws could prohibit nontherapeutic abortions at publicly-owned hospitals. This and a subsequent Court decision clear- ing the way for implementing the 1976 congressional provision restrict-...
a single Court decision.
FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE
The Enigma "The Historical Impact of Revealing the
Ultra Secret" Harold C. Deutsch, in of Ultra Parameters (vol. 7, no. 3), U.S. Army War
College, Carlisle Barracks, Pa. 17013.
Publication of The Ultra Secret by Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham
in 1974 stunned historians by revealing the extent to which the Western
Allies had enjoyed access to the most secret communications of the
German High Command during World War 11. The...
Hitler's decision to maintain
tight radio silence prior to the German surprise attack.
Lasery Laser "Strategic and Arms Control Implica-
tions of Laser Weapons" Barry J. in the Sky Smernoff, in Air University Review (Jan./
Feb. 1978), Superintendent of Docu-
ments, Government Printing Office,
Washington, D.C. 20402.
The United States and Russia are both spending heavily to develop
laser weapons capable of destroying military targets by means of a high
energy beam of electromagnetic...
the other. But he warns that there are broad gray areas between high energy laser systems designed only to track satellites and the lethal laser weapon systems. This blurring is likely to increase as high energy laser technology ad- vances, producing severe problems for arms control negotiators. On the other hand, Smernoff suggests, perhaps the primary task of long-term arms control should be to seek a smooth transition from the instability of nuclear deterrence based on offensive weapons to reliance...
the Russell tribunal, are "grotesque" and "absurd," says Lewy. The Vietnamese population increased during the war; American aid substantially improved medical care and (temporarily) raised the Vietnamese standard of living. The proportion of civilians killed-45 percent of all war deaths-was no higher than in other conflicts of this century and less than some, including Korea (70 percent of all war deaths).
These "cobwebs of mythology" that contribute to the sense of...
Richard Burt, in The Wash-ington Review (Jan. 1978), Transaction Periodicals Consortium, Rutgers Univer- sity, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
Western hopes for the success of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union have vastly declined over the past five years. Three trends in Soviet behavior have been especially disconcerting, says Burt, defense analyst for the New York Times. These trends are: the continuing momentum of Soviet weapons procurement; Moscow's em- phasis on air defense...
Richard Burt, in The Wash-ington Review (Jan. 1978), Transaction Periodicals Consortium, Rutgers Univer- sity, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
Western hopes for the success of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union have vastly declined over the past five years. Three trends in Soviet behavior have been especially disconcerting, says Burt, defense analyst for the New York Times. These trends are: the continuing momentum of Soviet weapons procurement; Moscow's em- phasis on air defense...
Robert
S. Pindyck; "Limits of Arab Oil Power"
Realities of Oil S. Fred Singer; in Foreign Policy (Spring 1978), P.O. Box 984, Farmingdale,
N.Y. 11737.
Gloomy predictions that world energy demand will exceed supply by the early 1980s, leading to another jump in oil prices and worldwide recession, are unrealistic. They fail to account for the fact that oil de- mand and production capacity are highly sensitive to changes in price. They also ignore the contrary objectives of the OPEC "spenders"...
Robert
S. Pindyck; "Limits of Arab Oil Power"
Realities of Oil S. Fred Singer; in Foreign Policy (Spring 1978), P.O. Box 984, Farmingdale,
N.Y. 11737.
Gloomy predictions that world energy demand will exceed supply by the early 1980s, leading to another jump in oil prices and worldwide recession, are unrealistic. They fail to account for the fact that oil de- mand and production capacity are highly sensitive to changes in price. They also ignore the contrary objectives of the OPEC "spenders"...
PERIODICALS
ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS
focused almost exclusively on the stock market, where foreigners held an estimated $45 billion worth of securities at the end of 1977. This is now rivaled a great spurt of direct investment, says Samuelson, including the purchase of U.S. companies (e.g., Miles Laboratories by West Germany's Bayer AG), real estate (e.g., the purchase of farms and small real-estate developments by German and Italian investors), and in a few cases the construction of...
these and other barbarians were pastoralism and a nomadic way of life. Lifestyle, not race, says Jones, defined barbarian man.
The Central Asian nomads eventually found themselves in hostile climates and environments and were forced to adopt more "civilized" forms of economic and social organization. the early Middle Ages, the distinctions between "civilized" and "barbarian" cultures had be- come artificial. Yet cultural prejudice continued to cause civilized men to...
Charles 0. Jackson, in The Journal of American Studies (Dec. 1977), Cambridge University Press, 32 E. 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
Twentieth-century custom enjoins Americans to repress grief and to
deny any thought of death. But it has not always been so. Jackson, a
University of Tennessee historian, reviews the scant literature and finds
three distinct phases in the history of American attitudes and responses
to dying.
In colonial times, when as many as one in four childen died before...
urbanization, rapid advances in medicine, and by an increasingly temporal outlook. Americans are less and less willing to involve them- selves in death and dying. People are allowed to die in institutions and to be buried under unadorned, uninscribed tombstones. There is often no sense of community loss. Our secular society no longer believes in the certainty of afterlife, so natural death and physical decomposition have become too horrible to contemplate or discuss.
Jackson sees hints in recent...
Nick Kotz, in The Washington Monthly
(Mar. 1977). 1028 Connecticut Ave. N.W.,
More than 1,200 newspaper reporters are accredited to cover the ac- tivities of Congress and the federal government in Washington, but only a small fraction of them work for newspapers that are read regularly in Washington or New York. To a remarkable degree, says Kotz, a prize- winning former Washington reporter, the New York Times and the Washington Post dominate the treatment of news. They shape the agenda, not only...
the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment" (and traditionally has been reserved for punishment inflicted for violation of criminal statutes), and whether "due process" is required before pun- ishment. The Court said no to both these questions.
Most newspapers failed to report that legal remedies exist on the state level for students who think they have been treated unjustly. Edi- torial writers, in particular, thought the Court was choosing between...
the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment" (and traditionally has been reserved for punishment inflicted for violation of criminal statutes), and whether "due process" is required before pun- ishment. The Court said no to both these questions.
Most newspapers failed to report that legal remedies exist on the state level for students who think they have been treated unjustly. Edi- torial writers, in particular, thought the Court was choosing between...
others for serving as the handmaiden of both the medical profession and the federal government in selling the pro- gram to the public.
To test such allegations, Rubin and Hendy, both of the New York University journalism faculty, analyzed stories in 19 daily newspapers, evening news broadcasts of the three television networks, and the out- put of United Press International for the week of October 11-17, 1976- the week when the inoculation program began in earnest and when three elderly persons...
PERIODICALS
RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
era1 moral principle that prohibits assaults on the defenseless. Torture, Shue notes, has nothing to do with a "fair fight" between declared combatants; it begins only after the fight is finished.
"Suppose a fanatic, perfectly willing to die rather than collaborate in the thwarting of his own scheme, has set a hidden nuclear device to explode in the heart of Paris. There is no time to evacuate the innocent people or even the movable art t...
David Kahn, in Harvard Mazazine (Mar.-Apr. 1978), Wadsworth House, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
The concept of physician accountability dates back to 2000 B.c., but only since the 1930s has the incidence of medical-malpractice litigation begun to resemble a patients' revolt. The current rash of malpractice suits (some 16,000 claims are pending against U.S. physicians) may stem in part from some ancient religious assumptions about the role of physicians and the practice of medicine, says Kahn, a Stoughton,...
syn- drome") probably originated during the early Christian era, when ill- ness was equated with God's punishment visited upon sinners and health was a blessing bestowed a heavenly Father. Prayer, the laying-on of hands, and treatment with holy oils supplanted medica- tion and treatment, and 2000 years of empirical medicine by the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks were largely discarded.
Healing by faith exerted a magnetic power to draw new converts to Christianity, especially during the...
PERIODICALS
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
eradicated in the foreseeable future.
Why the gloomy prognosis? The main reason is the rapid spread of insecticide resistance in mosquitoes. Today, 43 species of malaria- spreading anopheline mosquitoes are resistant to the organochlorine insecticides BHC and dieldrin; 24 to BNC, dieldrin, and DDT; 6 to both organochlorines, organophosphates, and carbamates as well. The use of insecticides BHC and dieldrin; 24 to BHC, dieldrin, and DDT; 6 to both organochlorines,...
the early 1930s, political doctrine had pushed the two countries into opposite paths. In the "nature-nurture" debate, nature won out in the extreme genetic doctrines of Nazi Germany, which sought to create a "master race" of genetically pure "Aryans." Nurture won out in Rus- sia, where an equally unsubstantiated Soviet doctrine, epitomized Trofim Lysenko's version of Lamarckism, ignored genes and sought in vain to produce better strains of food plants environmentally.
Graham...
Greg07 S. Paul. Falls Church, Va. ^Fu/n
Ceratosaurus, on the right, 15 feet long and weighing two tons, balances on its powerful tail to slash with clawed hind feet at a pair of agile allosaurs (averaging25 feet in length and weighing three tons).
large heat-storage capacity to reduce the changes in body temperature brought about environmental temperature changes. Uncertainty surrounds other aspects of the endotherm-ectotherm controversy, which may never be resolved because of the need to rely...
Richard J. Seltzer, in Chemi-cal and Engineering News (Feb. 20, 1978), 1155 16th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
The abuse of science and scientists for political ends, and the backlash this has provoked, threaten to disrupt international scientific relations.
Among the most glaring issues are the denial of scientific freedom and human rights to scientists, especially in the Soviet Union and Argentina; the banning of Taiwanese, Israeli, and South African re- searchers from world scientific meetings;...
Charles F. Cooper, in
~oreignAffairs (~pr.1978), 428 E. Preston
St.,Baltimore, Md. 2 1202.
Carbon dioxide makes up only .03 of 1 percent of our global atmos- phere, but without this slight COz envelope to keep heat from being radiated out into space, the earth would be 10 degrees centigrade colder. This is known as the "greenhouse effect." As the burning of oil, gas, and coal increases the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the temperature of the earth may rise sufficiently...
Alvin M. Weinberg, in American Scientist (Mar.-Apr. 1978), 345 Whitney Ave., New Haven, Ct. 0651 1.
The great energy debate, like great religious conflicts of the past, stems from two differing conceptions of the future: "the solar utopia and the electrical, i.e., nuclear, utopia." Both utopias, says Weinberg, director of the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn., are conceiv- able, and the most prudent planning will aim at some combination of the two.
Radical, pro-solar...
increasing world demand for oil and driving up prices.
Skeptics abroad wonder if U.S. nonproliferation policy is not really designed to curb the global shift toward plutonium and the breeder reactor until U.S. technology has caught up with Western Europe's. Such doubts about the motives behind President Carter's maneuvers, and the fickle nature of the U.S. decision-making process, provide more incentive for the rest of the world. including the less develooed coun-
"
tries, to set up enrichment...
the "Iron Madonna," who "strangles in her fond embrace the American novelist" and destroys his chances for greatness.
Later critics, like H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, turned on How- ells and labeled his new brand of social realism-evident in The Undis- covered Country (1879) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)-not only "commonplace" and "prudish" but inimical to literary esthetics. How- ells, in fact, did believe that wealthy Americans read little and...
Aubrey Beardsley.
cavalrymen were captured and sent to bolster Roman garrisons in northern Britain. (Archeological evidence points to a flourishing, close-knit Sarmatian community near the town of Ribchester.) Along with heavy armor, heraldic devices, and advanced cavalry techniques, these warlike Asians may also have transplanted the seeds of the Arthu- rian legends.
A last coincidence: The Roman commander of the Sarmatians in Britain was named Artorius.
"The Decline of Anglo-American Poetry"...
undergraduates (and some teachers) as our most impor- tant uoets.
Readers' desires for clarity and memorable language cannot be dis- missed as escapism or bad taste, Clausen concludes. On the contrary, this preference may simply indicate a desire for poetry that transcends the ills of modern life. Poetry must "reflect the complexity of [the poet's] thinking," as William Carlos Williams said late in his life, but it "should be brought into the world where we live and not be so recon-...
Surviving "A Millenium of Misery: The Demog-
raphy of the Icelanders" Richard F.
in Iceland Tomasson, in Population Studies (Nov.
1977), Population Investigation Commit-
tee, London School of Economics,
Houghton Street, Aldwych, London
WC2A 2AE.
The 11 centuries of Iceland's known history provide the most consist- ently bleak record of death and suffering a European nation has ever known. Thanks to the Icelanders' passion for genealogy and their early development of popular literacy...
Robert
E. Harkavy, in Orbis (Fall 1977), 3508 Market St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104.
For various historical and ideological reasons, Israel, South Africa, Taiwan, and South Korea now share the peculiar attributes of "pariahtude" marked extreme diplomatic isolation and "wide- spread, obsessive, and unrelenting global opprobrium."
As "pariah states," all four nations are militarily exposed, lack legitimacy in the eyes of much of the Third World, have weak diplo- matic...
Robert A. Mortimer, in Alma Saaft (Mar+. 19781,
lion Periodicals Consortium, Eaters
4-
Univend~,New Bnuwrick,NJ.08903.
he battle over the desolate ~estetn~aharacontinues to escalate militarily anddiplomatically,pitting MoroccoadMauritania against the Polisario~thePopularFront for theLiberationolSaguietel-Hamra andRiodeOro.
AfterSpainWedWistern SaharaovertoMorocco andMauritania in1976, in defiance ofUnited Nations callsfor a UN
McnxxcoandMauritaaia dup theiroewlyacqoired,inineral'rich
territory.
The-guerrillas,armedbYAlgeriahspreadthefightingInto
-md--dMww-w
todmakmdWd.
But thei^...
nine of the more radical OAU members (including Angola, Mozambique and Togo).
Meanwhile, neither Moscow nor Washington has encouraged its tra- ditional ally (Algeria and Morocco, respectively); Algeria has tried in vain to curry favor with the Russians condemning the peace initia- tives of Egypt's Anwar Sadat and seeking to reintroduce the Soviet Union into the Middle East peace negotiations. Mortimer argues that Washington should encourage "self-determination" for West Sahara for the...
Book Reviews
by Simon Leys Viking, 1977
Penguin, 1978
220 pp. $10 cloth
$2.50 paper
L of C 77-23175
L of C 77-15419 pbk
ISBN 0-14-004787-5 pbk
by George P.Shultz and Kenneth W.Dam
Norton, 1978, 225 pp. $8.95
LofC77-17981
by Karl May
Seabury Press, 1977, 654 pp
$12.95; 411pp. $10.95; and
749 pp. $13.95, respectively
L of C nos. 77-12605, 77-130
and 77-14342
ISBNs 0-8164-9316-2,
0-8164-9290-5 and 0-8164-9306-5
by Meyer Weinberg
Cambridge, 1977, 471 pp.
$27.50 cloth, $6.95 paper
L of C 76-4235
ISBN 0-521-29128-3 pbk
by Victor W. and Ruth Side
Pantheon, 1978
347 pp. $10.95
L of C 77-5196
by Louis-Philippe, King of
France, 1830-1848; Preface
by Henry Steele Commager
Delacorte, 1977
by Li Chi
Univ. of Wash., 1978
304 pp. $25
by Philip S. Foner
Greenwood, 1977
462 pp. $22.95
LofC77-71858
by Alistair Horne
Viking, 1978. 640 pp. $19.95
L of C 77-21518
by Harry Golombek
Crown, 1978, 360 pp. $14.95
LofC77-7635
by Chaim Bermant
Times Books, 1977
278 pp. $12.50
by Michael C. Hudson
Yale, 1977, 434 pp. $22.50
by Sissela Bok
Pantheon, 1978
326 pp. $10.95
L o~C 77-88779
by Andrew J. Cosentino
Smithsonian, 1977
214 pp. $22.50
Lofc77-608258
by Andrei Eely
Indiana Univ. Press, 1978
356 pp. $17.50
by Thomas Merton
New Directions, 1977
1,046pp.$37.50
LofC77-9902
by Anthony Eden
Doubleday, 1977
175 pp. $7.95
Lofc77-74298
by Robert R. Newton
Johns Hopkins, 1977
411pp. $22.50
LofC77-4211
by Margaret Mead
Harper, 1978, 345 pp. $12.95
LofC73-4110
Fellows and Former Fellows
L'HOMME DEVANT LA MORT. Phillipe AY~S.
Paris: kditions Du Seuil, 1977.
THE SPONSOR: Notes on a Modem Potentate. By Erik Barnouw. Oxford, 1978.
THE DIPLOMACY OF DETENTE: The Kissinger Era. By Coral M. Bell. London:
Martin Robertson, 1977; St. Martin's, 1977.
MAXWEBER: An Intellectual Portrait. By Reinhard Bendix with a new Introduction
by Geunther Roth. Univ. of California, 1978.
SOCIALISM AND POPULISM IN CHILE, 1932-52. By Paul W. Drake. Univ. of
Illinois,...
By John Baskin. New American Library, 1977. 259
pp $2.95
Edited by Nicolas Ducrot. Penguin, 1978. 224
pp. $8.95
By Eleanor B.Steinberg and Joseph A. Yager with Gerard M. Brannon.
Brookings, 1978. 256
pp. $4.95 (cloth, $11.95)
Edited by Anne Fremantle.
Mentor, 1977. 342 pp. $2.25
By Marvin Barrett. Crowell, 1978.
244 pp. $5.95 (cloth, $12.95
By Harold Rosenberg. Knopf (with the Whitney Museum of American Art), 1978. 256 pp. $10.95 (cloth, $25)
Essays
The scientists known to the Ameri- can public today are not inventors like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the others who be- came famous in the 19th century for technological innovations. Nor are they discoverers of new principles, like the 20th century's Albert Ein- stein. They are not leaders of the sci- entific community who have served as spokesmen in high places-such as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Millikan after World War I and electrical engineer Vannevar Bush after W...
Nathan Reingold
In 1800, the score of professional scientists in the United States was scarcely distinguishable from the somewhat larger group of devoted amateurs-like the gentleman-scholar Thomas Jefferson and the multi-talented Benjamin Franklin. As befitted a nation of farmers, sailors, and craftsmen, most Americans pursued such sciences as zoology, botany, geology, and astron- omy-sciences rooted in the world around them. There was a constitutional mandate to "wromote" the useful...
In 1800, the score of professional scientists in the United States was scarcely distinguishable from the somewhat larger group of devoted amateurs-like the gentleman-scholar Thomas Jefferson and the multi-talented Benjamin Franklin. As befitted a nation of farmers, sailors, and craftsmen, most Americans pursued such sciences as zoology, botany, geology, and astron- omy-sciences rooted in the world around them. There was a constitutional mandate to "wromote" the useful arts and sci- ences...
Very little human activity ever proves of much consequence in the anarchic scheme of history, and, whether fortunate or not, the fact is nonetheless irksome; men do not like to be told that they are plowing the waves.
The Roman noet Horace ventured one solution: Through
"
art, he claimed, one could erect a monument "more permanent than bronzeupand he was right, at least in his own case. But today men are building a collective, not an individual, monu- ment: the edifice of scientific...
SCIENCE
DILEMMAS
DOWN THE ROAD
by John D.Holmfeld
Since World War I1 science has become a major claimant on the federal budget; it now involves every federal department, some 45 congressional committees, a score of specialized agen- cies, about 500 universities, and nearly 2 million scientists, en- gineers, and technicians~one third of them concentrated in re- search and development.
If this effort seems diffuse, there are nevertheless some overarching principles. Among them: that the fe...
Thomas Cripps
Scholars cannot agree on the nature of "popular culture," but they do seem to know its sources.
They point, for example, to a demographic bulge toward the end of the 17th century that restored Europe's population to the high levels of 1348-the year of the Black Death. This emergence of a new mass audience coincided with the first industrial revo- lution; cheaper printing and increased literacy soon helped nur-
The WilsonQuarterlyISummer 1978
87
ture the rise of popular...
Scholars cannot agree on the nature of "popular culture," but they do seem to know its sources.
They point, for example, to a demographic bulge toward the end of the 17th century that restored Europe's population to the high levels of 1348-the year of the Black Death. This emergence of a new mass audience coincided with the first industrial revo- lution; cheaper printing and increased literacy soon helped nur-
The WilsonQuarterlyISummer 1978
87
POP CULTURE
ture the rise of popular...
POP CULTURE
clusively with daytime. The show features no gunfights or car chases; there are moments of leisurely, uneventful conversation between the younger and older generations.
It is a curious inversion: Where once daytime TV fled prime time, prime time now copies daytime. The evidence is every- where, from the success of The Forsyte Saga and Upstairs Down-stairs (soap operas with extra starch) to major television serials like Rich Man Poor Man, Roots, and Captains and Kings. Spec-taculars...
clusively with daytime. The show features no gunfights or car chases; there are moments of leisurely, uneventful conversation between the younger and older generations.
It is a curious inversion: Where once daytime TV fled prime time, prime time now copies daytime. The evidence is every- where, from the success of The Forsyte Saga and Upstairs Down-stairs (soap operas with extra starch) to major television serials like Rich Man Poor Man, Roots, and Captains and Kings. Spec-taculars aside, even...
Foredestined! A silken fervor caressed them, a flame consuming beautiful Star Lamont and dashing Captain Troy Stewart in a wave of ripening desire beneath the southern sky.
Foresworn! Across a fiery landscape scorched by the fury of slave revolt and the tumult of war-across the oceans and across the years-theirs is a story of surpassing grandeur, from a moment's shipboard encounter through a lifetime of everlasting love.
Forever!
Everywhere one turns these days the paperback stalls sport t...
POP CULTURE
by Frank D.McConnell
At one point in Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent, the hero-a hunted spy-hides out in a movie theater. A nondescript Hollvwood romance is on the screen, but the hero discovers in it a significance deeper than any intended by its makers: "It was as if some code of faith or morality had been lost for centuries, and the world was trvins to reconstruct it from the unreliable
d "
evidence of folk memories and subconscious desires. . . ."
A splendid...
Books on "popular" or "mass" cul- ture are nearly as numerous as the formula novels, movies, TV shows, comic strips, popular songs, "pop" paintings, and other manifestations of 20th-century life with which they deal. Some are excellent studies. Others are themselves a kind of "pop" scholarship; these are written according to formula, aimed at the college campus. Sometimes they make good reading, but they often are no more nourishing than spun- sugar candy.
Moreover, f...
1982, while asking Congress for an initial $800 million in compensatory arms aid for Seoul; both proposals stir debate. Here four historians- Samuel Wells, John Wiltz, Robert Griffith, Alonzo Hamby-look back at the war and what it did to America. Retired diplomat Ralph Clough examines the two Koreas today.
Samuel F.
For most Americans over 40, the bitter conflict on the Ko- rean peninsula from 1950 to 1953 evokes memories and lessons that differ from those of other wars. The Korean War had spe-...
Twenty-five years ago this summer, the guns finally fell silent in Korea, ending a bitter 37-month "limited war" that cost 34,000 American lives and engendered fierce political controversy at home. America's Korea veterans are now well into middle age, their efforts against the Chinese and North Korean invaders sel- dom remembered. But they succeeded in repelling Communist aggression, and the shock of that aggression changed modern American attitudes toward national security. The war's...
the press, Congress, and most of the public, ignored the crucial differences between Vietnam and Korea. "Controlled escala- tion' theories so popular in universities could not be applied successfully in Southeast Asia, for the circumstances were strik- ingly divergent. The Vietnam War in 1961-65 was not a formal military confrontation launched by an invasion across a recog- nized border, confined to a peninsula, fought by organized ar- mies, and supported by coherent populations on two clearly...
KOREA
The Korean War had an important influence on American politics and culture-less as a force that produced radical de- partures than as a force that accelerated and heightened proc- esses already underway.
Both the New Deal and World War I1 unsettled traditional notions about the size and the character of American govern- ment. As a result, during the years following World War I1 American leaders were involved in negotiating a series of ar- rangements to reconcile competing claims to the...
KOREA
sent in Cold War America.*
Finally, and more generally, the war slowed-if it did not halt entirely-domestic reform on the part of the Truman ad- ministration, while further strengthening conservative forces. Truman was forced to abandon the remnants of the Fair Deal and to depend more and more on conservatives, both in Con- gress, where he was now forced to seek accommodation with the southern Democrats, and within his own administration. The emasculation of the Housing Act of 1949 and...
by Ralph N.Clough
When the artillery finally stopped firing on July 27, 1953, Korea was a devastated land. The mountains and rice paddies were scarred by trenches and shell holes. Entire villages were erased. Seoul and Pyongyang were partly in ruins. And among the people, the trauma had been profound. The South Koreans had sustained 313,000 battle casualties; more than a million civilians had lost their lives; 2.5 million refugees had fled south from North Korea; and the economy was at a standstill....
the Ernest Hemingways and the James Joneses.
Korea's history did not, of course, begin with the U.S. entry into the 1950-53 war, although that period undoubtedly marks the beginning of many Americans' recognition of the Koreans as a separate people.
The strategic location of the Ko- rean peninsula meant that from the beginning its inhabitants were often subjugated outsiders, especially, for centuries, by invaders from the Chinese hinterland. The Chinese ruler Ch'i Tzu in 1122 B.C. subdued Korea's...
public agencies and private institutions
"The Universe: Finite or Infinite?"
Smithsonian Institution, Office of Public Affairs, Washington, D.C. 20560.2~~.
Author: George Field
The universe is now expanding, ap- parently as the result of a giant explo- sion some 15 to 20 billion years ago. Will it continue to expand indefinitely, or stop expanding and collapse?
While some recent observations suggest that it will expand through all eternity, scientists at the Harvard- Smithsonian Center...
To understand the United States today, it is necessary to know some- thing about the Establishment.
Most citizens don't realize it exists. Yet the Establishment makes its influence felt from the President's Cabinet to the professional life of a young college teacher who wants a foundation grant. It affects the nation's policies in almost every area.
-The News & Courier, Charleston, S.C., October 18, 1961
It is now, of course, conceded by Naturally, Establishment leaders most fair-minded...
