Mid-Twentieth Century America is an amazingly prosperous land—indeed, the wealthiest nation in the world. Yet in the midst of great plenty are two million people comparable in their destitution to feudal serfs, save that they are bound to no land. …
The phrase “the end of ideology” is becoming a catchword which sums up a major tendency of our time. Daniel Bell chose it as the title for his recently published collection of essays on American politics and culture. Edward Shils …
An editorial in the April, 1960 issue of Socialist Comentary begins as follows: It would be stupid to deny that demoralization has overtaken the Labor Party since the election. What could be more depressing than the contrast between the position …
Anything as bad a TV must be susceptible to some improvement, but the one sure way of not getting it is to make the programs more “cultural.” The TV chains and the FCC are momentarily nervous, and so they chatter …
THE POLITICS OF MASS SOCIETY, by William Kornhauser. Free Press. 1959. Of all the words employed by Socialists, Sociologists, Liberals, Political Scientists, Writers and Literary Critics, none has been so abused as the word “mass.” Whether it has been applied …
THE ECLIPSE OF COMMUNITY, by Maurice R. Stein. Princeton University Press. 1960. The Eclipse of Community is a reasoned manual of important American community studies of the past fifty years. One of its great merits is how it implicitly tells …
CRUSADER WITHOUT VIOLENCE, by L. D. Reddick. Harper. This book, by an occasional contributor to DISSENT, is a biography of Martin Luther King, the Negro minister who led the bus boycott in Montgomery and has since become one of the …
TUESDAY, May 3rd, was one of those lovely Spring days in New York: the Yanks were playing Detroit and the trees in City Hall Park were putting out new leaves. Yet before the day was over, Civil Defense officials were …
PEACETIME SPYING is politically hazardous. It affects national attitudes in much the same way that the peeping tom affects the neighborhood. Invasions of privacy prompt indignation. They make for anger and desperate unreasonableness. That is why the big blunder with …
Sons and daughters of the soil, on Monday, 21st March, 1960, we launch our Positive Decisive Action against the Pass Laws. Exactly 7 a.m. we launch. Oh, yes, we launch—there is no doubt about it. (ALL OVER.) We have reached …
If a cartoonist wished to exhibit the essentials of the current racial war in Alabama, he would only have to picture the actual scene that took place Tuesday morning, March 8, 1960, at the intersection of Thurman and Jackson streets …
Editors: It is hard to believe that a more incorrect impression as to the state of opinion in the British Labor Party could be created than that produced by Stanley Plastrik in the Winter 1960 DISSENT. Nationalization is presented as …
Sunday, March 6, 1960 dawned clear and cold in Montgomery, Alabama. It was like any other quiet Sunday morning, yet a feeling of unrest pierced the deceptive calm. Two days before, the Negro ministers of the city had scheduled a …
The sit-in demonstrations begun by four A. and T. College freshmen in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, had greater effect on the students of Alabama State College than most of us realized. Students here, as in other colleges, …
