Labor movements are remarkable modern institutions. All over the world, they have fought for what Marx called “the political economy of the working class.” They have transformed exploited workers into active citizens, and Social Darwinist battlegrounds into civilized and decent …
From cabinet appointments to policy initiatives, much about environmental politics in George Bush the Younger’s administration is depressingly familiar. We’ve seen this show before, when Ronald Reagan, his secretary of the interior James Watt, and company rode into Washington intent …
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere by Christopher Hitchens Verso, 2000, 538 pp., $25 On the fifth floor of Harvard’s Lamont Library, near the men’s room, there is an old, well-thumbed volume of Dwight Macdonald’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist. …
The right’s allergy to active government has become the dominant theme in American politics. Bill Clinton’s ability as a politician was not to challenge that theme, but to operate within it. So, by 1994, Clinton and the Democratic Congress were …
The film Thirteen Days, which deals with the Cuban missile crisis, reminds us that the danger of global nuclear annihilation does not come, mainly, from irrational adversaries and rogue states. Instead, the main threat stems from the policies and behaviors …
America needs “values.” That is the conservative harangue. But to think about values? That’s something else. They get away with sanctimony. Do I exaggerate? Return (O return!) to our “Constitution and Absolute Truth,” urges Tom DeLay, House Majority Whip. Truth …
In 1997, Arthur Levine, the president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, concluded a five-year national study of undergraduate attitudes about higher education. The study was like a cold shower, one made all the more jarring by the fact that Levine …
Madison, Wisconsin, 1969: Late that spring, after the largest antiwar marches and the student strike that brought out the national guard, the graduate teaching assistants at the University of Wisconsin made labor history. They voted in favor of union representation, …
Sometimes the essence of a societal moment is well captured by an individual artist. Such is the case for German photographer Andreas Gursky, whose work—displayed this spring in his first retrospective (1984-2000) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—captures …
Surely, a sector of the Inferno is reserved for bureaucrats. Bound together with unburnable paper chains, they shuffle along, hopeless, exhausted, in an endless, hell-girdling queue with neither head nor tail. Unworthy of Satan’s attention, their computerized torments are inflicted …
Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction by Gertrud Koch, translated by Jeremy Gaines Princeton University Press, 2000, 137 pp., $14.95 Sometime in the early 1990s, while I was a graduate student in Germany, I stumbled across a small paperback at one of …
The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (MAAH), which opened in Detroit in April 1997, has been acclaimed as the nation’s most important black history museum in numerous descriptive accounts, but, with a few notable exceptions, has not …
ATTORNEY GENERAL A. Mitchell Palmer had barely begun his roundup of foreign born radicals when alumni of the Greenwich Village “Little Renaissance” of the 1910s began to write the movement’s epitaph. Waldo Frank’s Our America (1919) set the tone for …
On the night of Manny Babbitt’s execution at San Quentin, Naomi White had a bad fall. Somewhere along the gravel path leading away from the prison, her ankle buckled and she tumbled face forward in the darkness. Her husband, Derrel …
Ruy Teixeira and I are in substantial agreement on many of the forces at work in contemporary politics—particularly on the central role of white, working-class voters in recent elections and the necessity of having an effective plan for promoting economic …
