Any new book on urban Negro problems risks being familiar, despite Kenneth Clark’s assertion that there is no comprehensive study focusing exclusively on the Negro racial ghetto. Ghetto conditions such as housing decay, illegitimacy, narcotics addiction, massive unemployment, inferior schools, …
It was Susan Sontag, I think, who first pointed up the extreme theatricality of Marat/Sade. Susan Sontag was right, Marat/Sade is theatrical. Is the play dramatic, though? About this there seems to be some question in even Miss Sontag’s mind. …
Britain has had a Labor government for more than a year, and only now does its position seem secure. Even to say that evokes an air of unreality, because the parliamentary majority is balanced on a knife-edge of three votes; …
The world knew him as a gifted musician, but to those of us who had grown up with him in the socialist youth movement, he was, above all, a figure from those vibrant years when everything seemed possible. Buoyant, large …
“We have been patient for five years with those who offered a military solution in Vietnam,” said Senator McGovern. “Now let us be equally patient in the effort to find a peaceful solution.” But the official “patience” of the U.S. …
This is an exciting book—though not at all the book its title seems to promise. “The New Radicalism” is a phrase woefully ill-suited to characterize so diverse and bizarre a cast of characters as Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Mabel Dodge …
Late in November a group of socialists, several of them editors of DISSENT, issued a statement concerning problems faced by the Vietnam protest movement. The signers of this statement were Michael Harrington, Bayard Rustin, Lewis Coser, Penn Kimble and Irving …
Among participants in the recent demonstrations for peace, especially the younger activists, dismay over the position of the unions on the Vietnam war has a way, at times, of spilling over into impatience, even hostility, toward the whole idea of …
Claude Brown speaks straight from the Harlem dead end. He is able to reproduce what no one quite has before: the sensation that there really isn’t anywhere further to go. In the South, working a cotton field twelve hours a …
The civil rights movement is pledged to nonviolence. It is commonly assumed by those of us involved in it that the provocation of violence is alien to its strategy and that violence is simply a calculated risk in trying to …
Peter Worsley, who holds the chair of sociology at Manchester, has written an admirable social-democratic manifesto for underdeveloped countries. Having just tried my own hand at dealing with this topic—a survey of the “Third World” and the prescription of new …
My own disenchantment with American society was not caused by its racial bigotry, its warlike posturing, its supreme respect for money. All these might be understood as irrationalities which could be struck from the national character if only rational men …
Letters from Andrew Hawley and George Fischer
I participated in what may well turn out to have been an historic occasion, the first “teach-in” at the University of Michigan. This originated as a protest movement against the escalation of the war in Vietnam, by a group of …
