University demonstrations against Dow Chemical erupted in the weeks immediately following the Washington march on the Pentagon on October 21. The Harvard sit-in took place on October 25. Dr. Frederick Leavitt, director of Dow’s lab in Wayland, Mass., was confined …
One senses that the doves have won, or at least have gone far toward winning, the battle to influence public opinion. A mood of dissatisfaction with the war and unwillingness to approve any further escalation has begun to take hold. …
The sheet ghastliness of the American war in Vietnam forces all of us on the Left to think again of civil disobedience. It has led some of us to plan or engage in kinds of civil disobedience far more serious …
One day, not soon, the welfare state will extend its benefits to all those men and women who are at present its occasional victims, its nominal or partial members. That day will not be the end of political history. But …
Though many of the young and idealistic radicals of this generation may be convinced that “participatory democracy” is a revolutionary concept of their own making, a re-reading of Saul Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals will remind us that the essential idea …
A survey commissioned by the AFL–CIO Committee on Political Education, and conducted by the Joseph Kraft polling organization in January 1967, offers rich information about the state of union membership. Ostensibly commissioned to prove that the rank and file is overwhelmingly …
Many well-intentioned Americans are deceiving themselves and the public when they speak of abolishing the slums. The slums can be abolished, but not in the way they suggest. A number of programs have been proposed to end the scandal of …
Georges Friedmann is a Frenchman, humanist, intellectual, distinguished sociologist, Jew. I choose the order of these modifying nouns deliberately, for Friedmann, like so many assimilated Jewish intellectuals and social scientists at work in Western Europe in the period between the …
The spirals of confrontation and force which marked recent campus demonstrations against Dow interviewers, military recruiters, and Johnson Administration spokesmen have raised serious issues regarding academic freedom. SDS and its allies have announced an abrupt turn “from ‘mere protest’ to …
I have two objections to Michael Walzees stimulating essay. Though Walzer’s main thrust is that tactical considerations are typically relevant to a moral estimate of civil disobedience, he allows an important exception: civil disobedience as personal protest need not be evaluated …
The “new economics” are clearly in. Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the commander in chief, the intellectual establishment, the fourth estate, indeed all who matter are now Keynesians. This is no minor accomplishment; compare the 25 years it took Congress to learn …
The “long, hot summer” of racial turmoil was succeeded by the short but intense autumn of teachers’ struggles. In a series of cities and states tens of thousands of teachers fought for union recognition, an improvement in school conditions, and …
In a recent New Yorker, Richard Rovere made these points: 1) there is no basic difference between the Korean and the Vietnamese wars; 2) nor is the different reaction to both due to the more developed techniques of reporting; 3) …
This collection of essays, which displays the author at work in a variety of settings, includes one piece that originally appeared in Dissent (“The Village Beat Scene: Summer 1960”), some scholarly papers, and various other material. Polsky manages to be …
On February 18, 1967, the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer came to an end. Its history, probed with such agonizing detail in the 1954 AEC Security Board Hearings, dramatizes the dilemma of the American scientist in the twentieth century. To appreciate …
