“The first act has come off very well, but who is going to write the second?” A local realtor addressed this question to the assembled “Central Committee” of the student movement in a large Southern city. The Negro businessman had …
A man is dead: you think of his living face, of his gestures, his actions, and of moments you shared, trying to recapture an image that is dissolved forever. A writer is dead: you reflect upon his work, upon each …
In the new states [in Asia, Africa and the Middle East]. one after another, the very groundwork we are discussing [representative government and public liberties] is in danger of being destroyed. There is another difficulty. Though all of us seem …
Ever since Francis Bacon in The Wisdom of the Ancients revised the earliest myths of the race in order to make man over, it has been a habit of the modern mind to interpret actions in the form of myth. …
A report from the February 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in Durham, North Carolina.
According to UN statistics, the nations of the world are spending about $90 billion annually in preparation for the kind of thermonuclear war which would destroy civilization and perhaps mankind— this in a world where 70 per cent of its …
When the Roman Empire had grown old and tired it began to rely, for the defense of its ramparts, less and less on the prowess of its citizens; instead, it paid subsidia to its minor allies, and even tributum to …
Successful co-existence of capitalist countries with the Soviet bloc depends on the realization in the former that the non-totalitarian ecnonomic system has been put on the defensive. The rising standard of comfort and ease in rich capitalist countries and the …
One of the most significant political events of the 1950s was the movement of the African states, and in particular the Negro peoples of sub-Sahara Africa, toward independence. As the previous decade belonged to the liberation movements of Asia, so …
We have survived yet another crisis in France. I use the passive form feelingly. It shows how far we have come since May 13, 1958 [the date of the Gaullist coup] and indeed since long before then. To some of …
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY, by Michael Young. Random House, New York Neither socialists nor sociologists have done full justice to the ambiguities of the idea of human equality. “Socialists,” writes Michael Young, “did not see that, as it was …
THE ORDEAL and spectacular death of King Kong, the giant ape, undoubtedly have been witnessed by more Americans than have ever seen a performance of Hamlet, Iphigenia at Aulis, or even Tobacco Road. Since RKO-Radio Pictures first released King Kong, …
Editors: Irving Howe claims that if Christ gave his Sermon on the Mount next week, among other routine reactions would be that “Dwight Macdonald would write that while ‘Mr. Christ makes some telling points’ they suffer from syntactical confusion and …
Durham, North Carolina is probably a town like many others; I doubt that ordinarily I would have found it unfamiliar. I saw it, however, only at night and carried away only two memories. The…
Growing up as a human being, a “human nature” assimilates a culture, just as other animals grow up in strength and habits in their appropriated environments, that complete their natures. Present-day sociologists and anthropologists don’t talk much about this process, …
