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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

America's Emerging Nation

The Lynching of "Boll Weevil"

Strange Fruit and Southern Tradition

The Anglo-Indian Community

The New Rhetoric of Woman Power

Down and Out in Paris and London: The Conflict of Art and Politics

VERSE

Driving in Snow

Current

Dream of the Bed-Sharer

Back

Where :5

Home Grown

The House of Quiet

Ceremony

In the Graveyard at Hioki

Cleaning Out My Dead Grandfather's Barn

Adventure

Sweeping

Abstract

in this issue. . .

THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY regretfully announces the resignation from its editorial board of Professor ROBERT BLUNK, whose increasing responsibilities as a teacher in the Art Department of Kansas State College, a consultant on numerous art projects, a member of the Kansas Cultural Arts Commission, and a practicing artist have left him, as he feels, with too little time for editorial duties which are growing increasingly heavy themselves. His successor has not yet been discovered.

THIS is our Minorities Issue, as anticipated in the "looking forward" pages of our October 1970 number, and very properly half our space is given to consideration of that racial minority whose rights and needs are today our most pressing responsibility. ORVILLE MENARD calls attention to the semi-colonial status of our black citizens and argues for some form of self-determination and self-rule for this emerging nation within a nation. In a blunt, unvarnished analysis of a southern lynching LEE A. DEW points directly to the participation of “best" citizens and community leaders in a perversion of justice usually played down as the work of an ignorant white lower class. Remembering that almost forgotten Southern pioneer of racist analysis, Lillian E. Smith, NEIL THORBURN discusses her novel Strange Fruit, a best-seller some thirty years ago, as a work preluding the Civil Rights crusade of the 1960's, and concludes that both this book and her non-fiction Killers of the Dream still have much to tell us. In their study of an Anglo-Indian community in presentday India ROY DEAN WRIGHT and SUSAN W. WRIGHT examine a rather different minority, the descendants of English administrators and native Indians, who, after years of comparative privilege, have fallen on hard times and are having great difficulty adjusting to a radically changed environment. Still another and even more novel "minority" group now making a beginning noise in the world are those Women's Liberation workers whose rhetoric MARGARET B. McDOWELL studies in a witty and provocative article. Regarding our sixth and last article, we are bound to admit that the poor have never been a minority, and we offer this study by DAVID L. KUBAL of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London as a contribution to literary analysis, yet not without a conviction that the poor and outcast whose life George Orwell tried so earnestly to enter and share are a true "minority" in their despairing powerlessness.

A STUDY of the Vietnamese War under the title "Dirty War Revisited" introduced Orville D. Menard to the pages of this journal in October 1968. He has the Ph. D. from the University of Nebraska, has published both books and articles dealing with military and other affairs, and since 1968 has been an associate professor of political science in the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

HIS ACCOUNT of the lynching of "Boll Weevil" marks also the second appearance of Lee A. Dew, an article on the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment having appeared in our Spring 1967 issue. He has the B. A. from the University of Arkansas, the M. S. from our Kansas State College, the Ph.D. in history from Louisiana State University. His teaching includes several years at Murray State University of Kentucky and the Arkansas State University; since 1969 he has been at Kentucky Wesleyan College. Among his publications are histories of an Arkansas railroad, of Arkansas State University, of the Catholic missions of northeast Arkansas all from the Arkansas State University Press, and various articles either published or accepted for publication by several state journals. His special research interest is short-line and narrow-gauge railroads, particularly the logging railroads of the lower Mississippi valley.

THE PARTICULAR interest of Neil Thorburn is American social and intellectual history of the twentieth century, with concentrations in the progressive era and the 1920's. His B. A. and M. A. (both in history) are from the University of Connecticut, and his Ph.D. in history is from Northwestern University. He has taught at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston and is now an associate professor of history and chairman of his department at Russell Sage College, Troy, New York, where he teaches such courses as Afro-American history and twentieth century American history. Among his several articles the most recent are an account of Frederic C. Howe in the April 1969 issue of Mid-America and a study of his dissertation subject, Brand Whitlock, as politician and muckraker, which appeared in the Winter 1969 Ohio History.

AS A FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR in 1963-1964 at Delhi University, Delhi, India, Roy Dean Wright had a firsthand glimpse of the problems encountered by the Anglo-Indian Community. A native Kansan, he received his B. S. and M. S. from Kansas State College and his Ph. D. from the University of Missouri, Columbia. He is a sociologist by training, his research interests including the sub-areas of social groups in South Asia, social stratification, minority groups, and social gerontology. Currently he is an assistant professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia. Susan A. Wright, originally from the state of Washington, completed her B. A. at the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, and her M. A. in sociology at the University of Missouri, Columbia. At the present time Mrs. Wright is an instructor of sociology at Radford College, Radford, Virginia. Her research concentrations include the American Negro, and she shares her husband's interests in social stratification, social gerontology, and social groups of South Asia.

AMONG the most recent publications of Margaret B. McDowell are an article on ninth grade teaching published in the spring 1970 Journal of English Teaching Techniques and "Edith Wharton's Ghost Stories" in the spring 1970 Criticism. At present she is collaborating with her husband, Frederick McDowell, on a book about Edith Wharton for the Twayne United States Authors Series. Her Ph. D. is from the University of Iowa, where she teaches in its Rhetoric Program.

AFTER taking a B. A. degree at the University of Notre Dame and an M.A. at Northwestern University, David L. Kubal returned to Notre Dame for his Ph.D. His teaching experience began at Loyola University, Chicago; from there he went to Indiana University, to the University of Notre Dame, to Michigan State University; since 1968 he has been an assistant professor in the English department of California State College at Los Angeles. His articles on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, and contemporary British writing have been published or accepted for publication by Bucknell Review, Arizona Quarterly, Statement, and Renascence.

TURNING to our poetry, we must confess mea culpa, mea culpa, with respect to the poem "Sweeping" by GIBBONS RUARK which first appeared in our July 1970 issue. We admired it even in a first publication flyspecked with typographical errors, and we expect to admire it still more in what we devoutly hope is a flawless presentation. Admittedly no editor can afford the costly space to atone for every error, and though we strive toward perfection, we quite naturally expect some license from contributors and readers, some impatient but quickly forgotten brushing away of flyspecks. But when a short lyric that depends for its effect upon its wholeness and perfection in every part, is botched and blotted with typos, the editor-proofreader owes amends. . . . We have instituted a new and we hope safeguard system of proofreading which should obviate our having to apologize to T. ALAN BROUGHTON, whose poem in this issue is his second appearance in the QUARTERLY. . . . It is a third appearance for EDITH SHIFFERT, whose first poem reflecting her Japanese background appeared in our January 1969 issue. We cannot forbear recalling the enjoyment of our visit last August to Mrs. Shiffert's Japanese house upon the river-shoes off at the door and the shoeless padding across soft cream-colored matting and the glimpses into odd and fascinating corners and the reading of poems deepened and illumined by their Kyoto setting--or the pleasure of visiting in our Kyoto hotel with Mrs. Shiffert and her young friend Yuki Sawa, whose poem about his father appeared in our July issue. Probably we could never respond to nature with the passion of the Japanese and would return from a cherry-blossom viewing with the uncomfortable sense that we had not felt all we were expected to feel, but in our new experience of "poet-viewing" we discover a real ardor.

MOST of the poets in this issue are new to us, though hardly new to the world of poetry. BENJAMIN K. BENNETT, born in Detroit and raised in New York, was educated at Columbia and Oxford and holds the M. A. Oxon. He is now a lecturer in German at the University of Virginia and is looking toward publication of a first book of poetry. Poems of his have appeared, or will soon appear, in Poetry (Chicago), Poet and Critic, The Lyric, Poet Lore, Prism International, The Smith, and an anthology entitled Dance of the Muses published by Young Publications. . . . ROBERT BLY publishes the Seventy's in Madison, Wisconsin and gives poetry readings around the country for a month or two in each year. This past fall the Beacon Press (Boston) brought out his anthology-history of the political poem in the United States entitled Forty Poems Touching on Recent American History. Since The Night Around the Body, the most recent collection of his own poems has been a book of prose poems called The Morning Glory published by Kayak Press in 1970. He writes that he expects to be living this year in Inverness on the California coast. . . . JOHN F. DRUSCOLL is a graduate of Windham College in Putney, Vermont, and is presently attending the University of Massachusetts, where he is teaching English and working toward an M. F. A. degree in poetry. . . . JACK FLAVIN works in the Springfield Public Library, Springfield, Massachusetts, and has published his poems in the Atlantic Monthly, The Falmouth Review, the Massachusetts Review, Quabbin, Epoch, and Intro # 1 (Bantam Books, 1968). . . . Louis GINSBERG, noted Paterson, N. J., poet, has appeared in so many poetry anthologies and magazines that we can name only a representative few, such as Untermeyer's American and British Poetry, Rittenhouse's Third Little Book of Modern Verse, Discovery I, the Atlantic Monthly, the Ann Arbor Review, Poetry (Chicago), The American Scholar, The New Yorker, the Massachusetts Review, Evergreen Review, and many, many more. His third book of poems, Morning in Spring, was published a few months ago by William Morrow Co., with an introduction by his son, Allen Ginsberg. . . . WILLIAM KLOEFKORN is a native Kansan and a graduate of Emporia State College, where he also earned his M. S. degree. He has done further graduate work at the University of Kansas and the University of Nebraska and somewhere along the way has served two years in the Marine Corps. He is married and has four children. During 1958-1962 he taught in the English department of Wichita University and has been in the English department at Nebraska Wesleyan in Lincoln since 1962. He became interested in poetry only a little over two years ago but has now had poems in the Ohio University Review, Kansas Quarterly, and Hiram Poetry Review. . . . BRIAN RICHARDS, originally from Ohio, is now working in the M. F. A. program at the University of Massachusetts. He has published in Intro (Bantam Books) and Massachusetts Review. . . . JOE SHEFFLER is not an easy man to find, but we are informed that he is a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts and is currently dividing his time between finishing his dissertation on Robert Creeley and writing poetry. "Where :5," one of his two poems in this issue, is the fifth in a sequence of poems.

THE FOLLOWING poetry competition has been announced:

DOROTHY ROSENBERG ANNUAL POETRY AWARD--$50 prize for the best poem dealing with "The Spirit of Man." Theme not limited to traditional or orthodox approach; no restrictions on style or length. Closes March 31, 1971. Administered by the Religious Arts Guild of the Unitarian Universalist Association. For details, write: D. R. A. P. A. Contest, Jeanne Hill, 164 Jersey Street, Marblehead, Massachusetts, 01945.

THE BRIEF REVIEWS in this issue are by Michael Heffernan, poetry editor, and Dudley T. Cornish, chairman of the history department, representing the history and social science area on our board of editors.

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