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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

The Civil Rights Movements, 1940-1954

The Revisionist Cold War Historians

American Culture and the College Generation

The Beginning of the End of Academic Liberalism

And the Wall Came Tumbling Down

Flares of Special Grace: The Orthodoxy of J. F. Powers

VERSE

Autumn: and Origins

Yes, Please

Concluding Services for Yom Kippur

Highway 99E from Chico: November 1967

October Birth

Era

H. J. Alfred Meets a Poet of Greater Reputation

Leaves Like Tears (for Jessie)

The Pasture

State Hospital

Deserted Tennis Court

Only the Sky

Abstract

in this issue. . .

After a spring sabbatical leave of blessed memory, the editor thanks retiring editor DUDLEY CORNISH for his able caretaking, uneasily resumes the editorial chair, decides that by the time the October issue appears it may prove a fit once more, reaches for the basket of manuscripts selected by Professor Comish with the advice and consent of the full editorial board . . . and discovers a richly varied collection, so varied that she is not immediately sure how to pull them together, except under our helpful rubric of "A Journal of Contemporary Thought."

CONTEMPORARY we can assuredly claim to be as we range from Civil Rights to Cold War revisionism to anarchy on our campuses--or in our theaters. DONALD R. McCOY of the University of Kansas and RICHARD T. RUETTEN of San Diego State College begin this issue with an illuminating study of the Civil Rights movement during the critical years 1940-1954. WILLIAM W. MacDONALD of Lamar State College (Beaumont, Texas) makes a thoughtful evaluation of the tenor of recent Cold War revisionism, and TOM COLEMAN of Eastern Kentucky University examines with some dismay the current symptoms of moral anarchy in American culture. From a frequent contributor, HENRY WINTHROP of the University of South Florida, comes disquieting word of an apparent decline in academic liberalism. BARRY N. SCHWARTZ, who appeared in our April issue, returns to describe the fall of the naturalistic theater, and BARCLAY W. BATES asserts a special stewardship over the work of another contemporary, novelist James F. Powers.

PARTLY because of the vital importance of the subject, partly because of the special interest of our first editor, Professor Cornish, whose book The Sable Arm was a pathbreaking investigation into the role of the Negro soldier during the Civil War, this journal has from the first been hospitable to studies of changing race relations in the United States. The authors of our present study come with special qualifications, for they are at this time engaged in a research project involving a full-length analysis of Civil Rights and the Truman administration, a project facilitated by their association with the Harry S. Truman Library Institute during 1967-1969. Donald R. McCoy has the A. B. degree from the University of Denver, the A. M. from the University of Chicago, and the Ph.D. from American University. On the staff of National Archives in 1951-1952 and the State University of New York in 1952-1956, he went in 1957 to the history department of the University of Kansas, where he has been a full professor since 1964. He has written or edited six books, including Angry Voices, Landon of Kansas, and Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President, and sixteen previous articles, including an account of Landon and the New Deal which appeared in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY in October 1964. His colleague, Richard T. Ruetten, has an A. B. from Colorado State College and both the A. M. and the Ph.D. degrees from the University of Oregon. In the summer of 1964 he held an American Philosophical Society grant. He has published a number of articles on American history in the scholarly journals. Since 1960 he has been at San Diego State College, where he is a full professor in the history department.

TO THE NON-HISTORIAN, like the editor of this journal, it may be something of a surprise to learn that in the United States itself there could be such totally divergent opinions of the Cold War as William W. MacDonald discusses, yet his balanced presentation makes a good case for taking a hard new look at ourselves in the light of such criticisms even while discounting their excesses. Professor MacDonald, who has a Ph.D. degree from New York University, teaches a wide spectrum of history courses at the Lamar State College of Beaumont, Texas. During the academic year 1968-1969 he held a Development Leave Fellowship from the State of Texas and was engaged in research at university libraries in the Boston area. He has written over eighty book reviews for various newspapers and periodicals, has published articles on Martin Luther and the religious policies of John Pym, and has completed a book-length manuscript on Pym's early parliamentary career. He has also published or had accepted for publication more than a hundred articles for the Westminster Dictionary of Church History. At present he is gathering material for an interpretive analysis of Tudor historians.

LINGERING memories of a recent involvement in committees vis-a-vis young college dissidents gave poignancy to the editor's reception of Professor Tom C. Coleman's article on the college generation. Still she is inclined to take a more indulgent or at least more hopeful view, and even to think that Professor Coleman himself is not altogether without hope. After service in the Army during World War II Tom C. Coleman took his A. B. at Transylvania College, his A. M. at the University of Louisville, and his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. During 1955-1967 he taught at Arkansas A. & M. College; since that time he has been at Eastern Kentucky University, where he is a professor in the English department. His doctoral thesis on the social and moral criticism of F. Scott Fitzgerald led to the writing of three Fitzgerald articles. He has written other articles on Henry James, William Faulkner, and American education. He is now working at a book on the evolution of Western culture.

THAT WE MAY BE seeing the beginning of an end to academic liberalism is the dismaying reflection of Dr. Henry Winthrop of the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, the University of South Florida, at Tampa. Professor Winthrop has appeared in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY on two such recent occasions that it seems hardly necessary to introduce him. His Ventures in Social Interpretation appeared last November. He has finished a volume of poetic satires, To Academia with Love, is currently working on several new books under contract, has accepted the editorship of one new journal and declined others, and in short is so busy a man that he "would have to live to be as old as Methuselah," he says, "to meet these many requests."

READERS of our April issue scarcely need to be reminded that Barry Schwartz, reappearing in the current issue with a study of the decline of theatrical Naturalism, is a man of many talents. Instructor in humanities, lecturer in the Art School and the Social Science department of Pratt Institute, editor of Readers and Writers, consultant for the Pratt Center for Community Improvements, not to mention other consultant and directing posts, he has also found time to write and publish many articles and poems, a book of poetry, a Grove Press book on art entitled Psychedelic Art (1968), and a work entitled White Racism USA, to be published by Dell this fall.

WHETHER OR NO it is common among editors to feel a special kindness toward the last person they introduce, this editor feels it. Perhaps it is her special literary interest coming to the fore; perhaps she especially likes Barclay Bates' "fierce conviction that most critical papers fail because of a failure to document." To her there has always seemed to be a true reverence, a proper humility, in the scholar who quotes his author rather than expounds himself. Barclay Bates earned the A. B. and A. M. degrees at San Francisco State College. He teaches English at Lowell High School in San Francisco and has published articles in Modern Drama and Western American Literature. This fall he is on sabbatical leave and hopes to write more criticism.

IF AN INSTITUTION, as Emerson has it, is the lengthened shadow of a man, then the poetry regularly appearing in the QUARTERLY must be described as our first editor's lengthening, many-colored shadow. Our friends the artists tell us that shadows do have color and certainly our poems have it, and our poetic accompaniment steadily lengthens. A quick check of back issues shows that Editor Comish decided very early to add the relish of poetry to essays in contemporary thought. Nine poems appeared in the April 1960 issue of our first volume, and afterwards a number varying from three to six to eleven, until somehow we fixed on a regular dozen from the April 1965 issue onward. An anthology of the verse published in our first ten volumes would comprise 365 pieces, and a very handsome anthology it would make, we are persuaded.

THAT WE ARE hospitable to new poets--new, at least, to our pages --this October issue witnesses. To old friends Sam Bradley, James Hearst, Alastair Macdonald, and Kinley E. Roby, we are pleased to add newcomers Raymond Carver, Christopher Fahy, Courtland Matthews, Dale Mindell, Mike Niemczyk, Lois Sadowski, Susan Schuchat, and Glenn R. Swetman.

IN A RECENT and most pleasant letter from his Pennsylvania address (winters, he is poet-in-residence at St. Augustine's, Raleigh, North Carolina), SAM BRADLEY assures us that he has no new important details about himself except that he has put together a manuscript collection of poems called Manspell/Godspell and that he continues to work on a book of poems about Africa. . . Since July, 1964, we have been publishing the work of JAMES HEARST, parttime poet and farmer and fulltime teacher at the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls. One of his poems appeared in our pages as recently as last April. . . . ALASTAIR MACDONALD, whom we first published about fifteen months ago, writes to us from Banffshire, Scotland, where he has been spending the spring and summer months, but he expects to be back this fall at his regular post of professor of English in Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada. His poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. . . . Late last January KINLEY E. ROBY reported from State College, Pennsylvania, that he had no new publications or exciting adventures, although he was looking forward to doctoral examinations that made him "feel as vulnerable as a Bay of Fundy clam digger working without his skiff." The present poem is his fifth in our pages.

TURNING to welcome our new poets, we learn that RAYMOND CARVER has published stories and poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and many another, has one book of poems in print and a second in manuscript, appeared in Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories, 1967, and has a story forthcoming in The Best Short Stories from the Literary Magazines, 1964-1968. Recently he completed a six-month study-travel trip to the Middle East and Europe and is now an editor in the college reading department of Science Research Associates at Palo Alto. . . . The poetry of CHRISTOPHER FAHY is just beginning to appear in the journals, and he is diligently at work on more poetry, a novel, and short stories. A Philadelphian with an M.A. in speech pathology, he is currently Director of the Speech and Hearing Center and Coordinator of Clinical Services for the Bancroft School in Haddonfield, New Jersey. . . . When it comes to poetry, COURTLAND MATTHEWS calls himself a "mustang,” and not surprisingly he follows this giveaway epithet with an account of his service in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II. Two poems about his experiences in the Aleutian campaign appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and Saturday Review, and his book-length verse narrative, Aleutian Interval, came out in 1949. Semi-retired after years of journalism, he is now giving more time to writing and publishing his poems. . . . DALE MINDELL describes herself as "a serious poet making a living as a housewife.” Her poems have appeared, or will shortly appear, in Arts in Society, Kansas Quarterly, South Florida Review, South Dakota Review, and Florida Quarterly. . . . MIKE NIEMCZYK is a rehabilitation specialist on the occupational therapy staff of a private psychiatric unit in Austin, Texas, which might be thought to have some bearing on his poem in this issue. He has poems coming out shortly in Kansas Quarterly and Whetstone. . . . A midwesterner, born in St. Louis, LOIS SADOWSKI moved to the West Coast some ten years ago and has been moving up and down the Coast ever since, now at U. C. L. A., now at L. A. State, now at Concordia Teachers College, and last and best, she says, at the University of Washington, where she has just received her A. B. degree. We have the honor to publish her first poem, although she has been reading her poetry over several of Seattle's radio stations. . . . Although she has had several poems published, SUSAN SCHUCHAT is still so new a poet as to be candidly thrilled over a new acceptance. She tells us she has not yet completed her first year of college. . . . GLENN R. SWETMAN, last of our newcomers, is by no means a newcome poet. His work has appeared in Film Quarterly, Wisconsin Review, Prairie Schooner, two Brazilian journals, and elsewhere, and his first book of poems is soon to be published. He is head of the English department of Francis T. Nicholls State College, Thibodaux, Louisiana.

THE EDITOR OF THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY has the serious pleasure of reviewing in this issue the work of two poets whom we have previously published, Official Entry Blank by Ted Kooser and This Earth and Another Country by Howard McKinley Coming.

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