The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 2 No. 1

Authors

James W. Vander Zanden
Richard C. Welty
Nita Laing
Lewis A. Bayles
James Woodress
Theodore M. Sperry
Midwest Quarterly Editors

Contents

Sit-ins in Dixie

Who Really Elects Our Presidents?

The Later Satire of Mark Twain

Are Pressure Groups Threatening American Democracy?

The Anatomy of Recent Fiction Reviewing

Manioc, Millet, and the Millions

Abstract

in this issue...

WITH this number, THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY begins its second year of publication. Everything considered, the editors face the future with confidence. Subscription renewals have been coming in all summer, and even more important, unsolicited manuscripts from all over have been arriving with increasing frequency.

This first issue of Volume II contains articles on a variety of subjects of rather strong current interest. The editors have taken into account several incontestable facts in selecting these discussions for publication. This issue appears a short month before the American presidential election. This month marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Clemens, and appropriate ceremonies a,re scheduled for Hannibal, Missouri, under the sponsorship of the Central Mississippi Valley branch of the American Studies Association in which roughly one-third of the editorial board are involved. With the opening of a new academic year (it seemed fairly certain as this copy went to the printer) the technique of non-violent demonstrations against various forms of racial segregation will continue to spread in the American South. All these facts have helped the editors in their continuing function of trying to select the most appropriate available material for their readers.

DURING THE LAST six months American news media have been full of reports of spreading efforts on the part of American Negroes to combat racial segregation by the non-violent technique of "sitting-in." Fortunately, THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY received, early this summer, a discussion of this phenomenon by a sociologist who has had almost unparalleled opportunity to observe it at close hand. JAMES W. V ANDER ZANDEN has lived and worked in the south, particularly in Georgia and North Carolina, for the past six years, and the lead article in this issue is the latest of his many discussions of the difficult problems composing the desegregation syndrome. Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, thirty years ago, Professor Vander Zanden holds the bachelor and master of science degrees in sociology and anthropology from the University of Wisconsin. For two years he taught at Paine College in Augusta, Georgia, an accredited Negro institution, in order to have opportunity to study southern Negro life at first-hand. In 1958 he was awarded the doctor of philosophy degree in sociology by the University of North Carolina, after which he was instructor in sociology for two years at Duke University. He is a prolific writer on racial problems, and a baker's dozen of his articles have appeared or will shortly be published in a variety of journals including The American Mercury, Social Forces, The American Journal of Sociology, The Journal of the History of Ideas, and The South Atlantic Quarterly. This fall he became assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University. His discussion of "Sit-ins in Dixie" is valuable because of the insights it provides and the light it throws on the significance of this new development as an expression of discontent and urgency on the part of young southern Negroes.

ONCE EVERY FOUR YEARS we Americans go through the process of electing a president. These elections take on the appearance and characteristics of a mixture of old-time revival, frontier medicine show, Fourth of July celebration, and the hard sell of the Madison Avenue huckster. Beneath the more obvious froth on the surface are the political customs and institutions of this nation, partly constitutional and partly the result of solidified behavior-patterns. While everyone in the country will know by the second Wednesday in November who will be the next president of the United States, this general knowledge will not become legal fact until the members of the Electoral College meet in fifty separate groups something over a month later. To analyze this political curiosity, the editors were able to secure the services of RICHARD C. WELTY, associate professor of political science in this College. Readers of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY will recall his discussion of the question, "Are The States Obsolete?" which appeared in our first issue last October and attracted nation-wide attention. His present article, like his first, is characterized by clear analysis and careful organization based on years of direct observation and study of American political history and practice. Professor Welty holds the bachelor of arts degree from Fort Hays Kansas State College and the master of arts and doctor of philosophy degrees in political science from the University of Colorado. He joined the faculty here in 1953 after a year at Hamline University in Minnesota.

THERE IS NO WAY like the American way when it comes to appreciating literary genius. Throughout our relatively brief literary history, we Americans have tended pretty much to ignore our own writers in favor of the lions of European letters, and it has been only in the last quarter century that an undergraduate degree in literature would necessarily include anything by an American writer (with the possible exception of Henry James, who became a British subject during World War I). The past twenty-five or thirty years have witnessed a healthy change (not completely accepted as yet by some professors of English Literature), with the result that more and more attention has been given American authors and their work on both the undergraduate and graduate levels. One tangible result of this has been a plethora of articles, books, and academic courses analyzing the life and works of Samuel L. Clemens, better known to his fellow countrymen as Mark Twain. This year, the 125th anniversary of his birth and the fiftieth anniversary of his death, has seen rather tremendous emphasis on Mark Twain's impact on American life and letters. Readers of THE MIDWEST QUARTERL Y will recall that our January issue contained an analysis of his apprenticeship as a West Coast journalist by our own John Q. Reed, professor of American Literature here and presently a member of our editorial board. In this issue we present an analysis of the work of the elder Mark Twain, particularly of his later satirical writings. And once more the editors are indebted to John Reed for discovering this analysis, a paper written by a graduate student enrolled in his Mark Twain seminar this summer.

The author, NITA LAING, modestly describes herself as "an ordinary middle-aged housewife with no qualifications as a literary critic whatever-unless you could count an almost pathological interest in literature." Even this interest, she confesses, she has not been able to indulge very fully, at least not for the last thirteen years, since during that time at least one of her children has been able to climb into her lap and close the book every time she sat down to read. "I have managed," she reports, "to continue reading a little, however, standing up, with the result that I now have fallen arches and a strong predilection for the short story." She grew up in Texas, leaving there at the age of eighteen to go to Washington, D. C., as a government typist. After her marriage to Millard Laing, now chairman of the Department of Music at Kansas State College of Pittsburg, she taught mathematics, science, and agriculture (!) in a Texas junior high school for two years; she finished her bachelor's degree in 1947 at East Texas State Teachers College at Commerce. After that, while her husband was doing graduate work at the University of Michigan, she again taught mathematics and science in the junior high school at Willow Run. Last summer she decided that her children were old enough to permit her to return to college, and she has now completed about two-thirds of the work for a master's degree in English. However meager (her word) her qualifications, her article struck the editors of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY as a mature and incisive discussion of Mark Twain's later work. Despite her suggestion that "the only way for you to retain the respect of your readers is to pretend that you found it in the wastebasket," we are proud to present her article on the basis of its obvious quality.

DESPITE THE FACT that observers of American life for well over one hundred years have commented on the American tendency toward associations, it has been in only the most recent times that political scientists have begun to discover that so-called "pressure groups" perform desirable, indeed invaluable, services on the American political scene. The fourth article in this issue answers the question "Are Pressure Groups Threatening American Democracy?" with a rather firm negative. LEWIS A. BAYLES, associate professor of social science, has been a member of the College faculty since 1957, teaching American Problems, political theory, and related subjects. He holds the bachelor of arts degree from the University of Kansas and a rather unusual interdepartmental doctor of philosophy degree from Ohio State. His doctoral work there was in the three related fields of educational philosophy, political science, and sociology. His dissertation explored the area of group power in democratic society, and his article here published is an outgrowth of this comprehensive study. This article is an expansion of a lecture presented last February as part of the 1959-60 series of Great Issues Lectures sponsored by the Department of Social Science.

ONE OF THE WHlPPING BOYS of American letters is the book reviewer. His material rewards are slight, usually a few dollars and/or a free copy of the book under discussion. The documentary evidence indicates that the reviewer seldom pleases anyone, and from time to time he calls down the wrath of a variety of authors and editors who seem to delight in accusing him of everything from intellectual dishonesty to accepting "payola" from the publishers.

His curiosity aroused by recurring complaints and laments about the alleged sorry state of book-reviewing in the United States, JAMES WOODRESS, chairman of the Department of English at San Fernando Valley State College in California, decided to investigate the charges for himself. The result is an interesting and surprising report. He originally read it in a somewhat abridged form before the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association in annual conference assembled last December. Professor Woodress is a Missourian by birth with degrees from Amherst, New York University; and Duke. His field is American Literature, and he taught in Grinnell College and Butler University before going to California. He is the author of books on such distinguished figures in American Literature as William Dean Howells, Booth Tarkington, and Joel Barlow; he has written biographies of the last two. Currently he is in charge of compiling the American section of the annual Modem Language Association bibliography. The editors of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY--some of whom also write book reviews occasionally--are particularly pleased that Professor Woodress selected this publication for this excellent and timely discussion.

IT SEEMS HARDLY NECESSARY to remind our readers of what has come to be called the "population explosion" and the rather alarming problems which follow in its train. While there is no current food shortage in the American Midwest, the alarming rate of human reproduction has given rise to considerable concern over food supplies for the future. Neo-Malthusians tend to view the future with considerable trepidation, and their suggestions have included everything from kelp to plankton as basic food materials. The editorial board of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY includes a man with an international reputation as an ecologist: THEODORE M. SPERRY, professor of botany and ecology. Butler University, the universities of Illinois and Wisconsin, the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and Air Force have contributed to his academic and professional background. In 1951-52 Professor Sperry spent a year in the Belgian Congo as consultant for the Institut National pour L'Etudie Agronomique du Congo Beige (INEAC). He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Ecological Society of America, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the National Geographic Society, the Inland Bird-banding Association, the Grassland Research Foundation (past secretary-treasurer), Nature Conservancy, the Kansas Ornithological Society (past president), Sigma Xi, and Phi Sigma. He is currently president of the Kansas Academy of Science and leading spirit in this college's faculty seminar in liberal education. His article, "Manioc, Millet, and the Millions," was originally presented as a paper at one of the spring meetings of the seminar. In it, he makes some intelligent suggestions for improved land management adjusted to the socio-economic needs of the populations involved.

Professor Sperry has had abundant practical experience in land management. From 1936 to 1941 he established a one hundred-acre prairie in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum; for the past decade he has been experimenting with a one-acre urban ecological development around his home in Pittsburg, and in 1951-52, he assisted in the mapping of about 90,000 hectares of savanna vegetation in Ituri, Belgian Congo. The record of this last experience is published in "Notice Explicative de la Carte des Sols et ' de la Vegetation," Cartes des Sols et de la Vegetation du Congo Belge et Ruanda-Urundi (Nioka, Ituri, and Bruxelles: Publications de l'INEAC, 1954).

Recommended Citation

Vander Zanden, James W.; Welty, Richard C.; Laing, Nita; Bayles, Lewis A.; Woodress, James; Sperry, Theodore M.; and Midwest Quarterly Editors (1960) "The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 2 No. 1," The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 2: Iss. 1, Article 1.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol2/iss1/1