The infamous “membership clause” of the Smith Act makes it a criminal offense to be a “knowing” member of any organization which “advocates” the violent overthrow of the government. Evidence of specific actions aimed at revolution is not required for …
Editors: I had planned to let my subscription expire, but your Winter issue was so good that I changed my mind. I was particularly interested in the correspondence between Irving Howe and Paul Goodman on the family. Apparently both men …
When the cease-fire after eight years of war in Algeria was at last announced on March 17th, no sirens screamed in Paris, no anxious mothers fell down on their knees to pray in the streets, no crowds foregathered to burst …
What makes me identify as a radical is the conviction that something new must be added to the American calculus of goods and bads, rights and wrongs. I have an uneasy sense of a whole nation skating lightly over a …
I view this undertaking with skepticism. Perhaps I am influenced by the grotesque product of the Commentary effort, but I think that my objections to a symposium on Young Radicals go deeper. Such a symposium presupposes that there is in …
When I was asked to summarize in a few pages my general reaction to this symposium I assumed that this would be an easy task. In fact I have been trying for several hours to discern common themes to which …
I am writing this from New Haven. Last night I debated a retired general on the House Un-American Activities Committee before about two hundred students. The meeting was sponsored by “Challenge,” an organization at Yale which brings controversial speakers to …
The victory of the United Federation of Teachers in the collective bargaining election among 33,000 classroom teachers in New York last December, probably the largest white-collar election ever held in this country, has had some important effects. It will certainly …
A little imagination can go a long way. Just when it seemed that the issue of trade union democracy was to be smothered by the fatuity of the CIO-AFL Ethical Practices Committee, and general indifference, Herman Benson came along with …
We met by chance on the subway platform. My friend was on her way to the Cherry Lane “Theatre of the Absurd”: Ionesco’s “The Killer,” if I recall. Would I go along? I declined with thanks; I was on the …
Columbus Day 1961, the AFL—CIO Executive Council inadvertently brought on the birth pangs of a new American union movement. When the travail is over very few of the old-crony midwives who now run the AFL—CIO will be around, and almost …
If anyone except a trade-union president—say a bank president, an old-line political boss, an insurance-company president, or a corporation lawyer—had ordered as much cash and manpower into an election campaign as Walter Reuther mobilized for Jack Kennedy, he would have …
Scandinavia Liberals can always be made uneasy when told the “fact” that suicide rates and other indices of social disorganization are very high in the Scandinavian countries under the welfare state. This “fact,” it turns out, just isn’t one. The …
These days we don’t ask of a new president “what will he do?” but “how will he appear?” The image of the leader at home, and now the “credibility” of his intentions abroad—these are the crucial elements of contemporary politics. …
THE PEACE RACE, by Seymour Melman. Ballantine. 152 pp. 1961. In his eloquent address at the United Nations, President Kennedy warned that if a peace race did not supersede the arms race, our globe might be turned into a flaming …
