Social Mobility Among The Dead  

Sociology has long concentrated on the study of vertical social mobility, that is the movement of persons up or down the social hierarchy. I wish to point out here that the approach to this subject has so far been unduly …



Journey To The End Of Right  

Now that our distinguished liberal intellectuals have finished proclaiming “the end of ideology,” it begins to seem that we are entering an intensely ideological period in American history. After living in California only a few months, one discovers that the …



Youth Work Camps  

The idea of work camps for unemployed teen-agers has always been attractive, it has somehow seemed “right.” So it recurs whenever, as now, the competitive labor market begins to fail these youth. The camps are first set up as a …



Civil Defense Of The New Frontier  

In the age of Eisenhower, America’s civil defense “program” was an amusing fraud. Presidential, Congressional and public apathy inspired bumbling CD officials to actions that were sublimely ridiculous. Back in 1952, when no constructive use could be found for the …







Courage And Economics In Washington  

When FDR came to Washington in 1933 he was accompanied by dashing young economists and social scientists ready to remake the government, if not the world. Many were fresh from Columbia University, and quite unlike the Harvard—MIT contingent that now …





Food For China  

We now have sufficient information confirming that the Chinese Communists have approached American officials and private exporters with proposals to buy large quantities of American surplus wheat and grains to feed China’s hungry millions. One such report states that China …



The Urgency Is Greater  

As this issue is being completed, it appears that the Kennedy Administration has finally decided to resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere. This decision, leaked to the press after the Kennedy-MacMillan meeting in Bermuda, is to be carried out in …



Public at Both Ends  

It is a long time now since craftsmen in the trade regarded with amusement any statements suggesting that publishing was a business—publishers had considered themselves gentlemen, not businessmen, and their declared concern had been with art, not commerce. But that …



The Socialist Dilemma in Europe  

For a full decade now—for a span of years that is gradually coming into focus as a historical epoch in its own right—the major countries of Western Europe have been living under conservative rule. This situation has created new and …



The Conventions of the Mad  

The letters column of the July ’61 number of Mad comics under the banner, “A Mad State of Affairs,” features a photograph of the daughter of the governor of North Carolina smilingly enthroned in bed with a batch of Mads. …



Letters  

The FLN Editors: In the Spring/1961 issue of Dissent your Paris correspondent, Paul Parisot, states that “The FLN is tied to the International Communist bloc and includes an internal tendency whose orientation, thought and fundamental political conceptions have nothing in …



Cuba And Radicalism  

Reading your special issue, Cuba: The Invasion and Its Consequences, was indeed a painful experience. In the aftermath of the Cuban “fiasco” surely more could be expected from a magazine that claims to be democratic socialist and radical than this …