The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought
Contents
ARTICLES
Student Dissent and the Values of the University: A Problem of Coexistence
On Understanding Newspaper Accounts of Contemporary Social Issues
The Political Theory of Male Chauvinism: J.J. Rousseau's Paradigm
Southern Integration: An Example of the Power of Law
Exploring the Broad Margins: Charles Ive's Interpretation of Thoreau
Mark Twain's The Gilded Age and Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt
VERSE
Fool's Poem. April
and saw strange things
Listen You Guys
The People Dream and Speak of Freedom
fading trail
if i kill a man
Just Passed 23, Looking Wildly for 22
the wind
The Stickpin
bird light
Bad Man's Lament
Abstract
in this issue. . .
THERE ARE LUXURIES no editor can afford, like closing up shop on a balmy spring day with the rationalization that there is nothing new under the sun and of making quarterly magazines there is no end and much writing is a weariness and a vexation of the flesh. To these limited and self-serving truths we are quarterly constrained to oppose the recollection that however little our efforts accomplish we would accomplish nothing if we made no efforts. The fact that our problems are perennial does not let us off the perennial struggle to ameliorate them. Looking back a year ago, we find we were talking about student rebellion, about a dangerous "illiteracy" in an increasingly complex and demanding age, about the new feminism-and we are still talking about them. They have not, meanwhile, gone away. Nor has the race problem, another of our perennial subjects, nor the political and social corruption depicted in novels by Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis analyzed in this issue. Perhaps, after all, it was our article on Thoreau, as Charles Ives recreated him in music, that inclined our thoughts toward Walden these sunny April days.
STUDENT DISSENT, and how to accommodate it within the University structure, is a problem which has engaged the attention of psychologist JOHN L. HORN for some time. He has published articles on this subject in the University of Denver Magazine and, with P. D. Knott, in Science, and a section in Student Activism (Brown, 1971). His broader academic and research interests have taken him into the areas of personality development and assessment, methods and designs for scientific study, abnormal psychology, psycholinguistics, and social psychology. Beginning in 1960, he has published between sixty and seventy articles in these different fields, a number of which have been reprinted in various books of psychology. He has held a number of fellowships, including a Fulbright at Melbourne University, the N. I. M. H. at the University of Illinois, and the U. S. Office of Education Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. He holds the A. B. degree from the University of Denver and the A. M. and Ph. D. from the University of Illinois, and is now a professor of psychology at the University of Denver.
THE AUTHOR of our current investigation into student literacy—and the dimming outlook for a democratic way of life based on an informed electorate—is no newcomer to our pages. In the Winter 1968 issue we inaugurated a long and profitable association with Professor HENRY WINTHROP of the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at the University of South Florida. Following this initial study of "The Alienation of Post-Industrial Man,'' Professor Winthrop returned to the Fall 1968 issue with a consideration of "Ideology versus Scientific Rationality," and to the Fall 1969 issue with "The Beginning of the End of Academic Liberalism." Holder of the Ph. D. degree from the New School for Social Research, author of many learned articles, in English and other languages, and of governmental studies and books, Professor Winthrop has been honored most recently by membership in the International Council of the International Center for Integrated Studies. We might add, on a personal note, that we have been particularly interested in his current research into the understanding of newspaper accounts because here we were at least competent enough to recognize our incompetence. We did not identify all those acronyms either.
THAT Jean-Jacques Rosseau was a male chauvinist of special virulence will not be a completely novel idea to those interested in the new movement for the liberation of women, but nowhere have we seen this identification treated more clearly and completely than in this present study by political scientist RON CHRISTENSON, Associate Professor, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota. That Professor Christenson has an interest in the general subject of political suppression appears in his article "The Political Theory of Persecution: Augustine and Hobbes," Midwest Journal of Political Science, August, 1968. For his conversion to the cause of women's liberation he gives credit to his wife, Kathryn, as well as thanks for her assistance in matters of writing style. A native of Wisconsin, Professor Christenson has the B. S. degree from Wisconsin State at Eau Claire and the Ph. D. from the University of Minnesota, where he also held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and subsequently a Greater University Fellowship. In addition to his articles he has published book reviews in American Political Science Review, Western Political Quarterly, and the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune.
A BACKGROUND in business and law plus a lifetime of experience in southern ways have given JAMES G. FRIERSON the familiarity and understanding with which he writes of changing southern racial attitudes brought about in large measure by the law. Professor Frierson has the B. S. degree from Arkansas State University and the Juris Doctor from the University of Arkansas, and he has done postgraduate work in law and business at the Universities of Mississippi and Arkansas. After several years in business and parttime practice of law, he entered the teaching profession as an instructor of business law and business administration at Arkansas State University. Since 1968 he has been an assistant professor in the Department of Business Administration, Kansas State College of Pittsburg. One of his articles appeared in the American Business Law Journal, and another was published by the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company and given wide distribution on several hundred college campuses. He has published a book, Law I Supplement, emphasizing the historical development of the law, and he is currently engaged in legal research under a grant from the Fund for Academic Improvement, Kansas State College.
OBSERVED our friend and associate editor, after he had read the study of Charles Ives interpreting Thoreau with which ANDREA GOUDIE makes her apperance in this issue: "It fits my mood very well. I've been reading Walden Two this week and am more aware than ever of the necessity for a broad margin to life." We spoke our feelings earlier when we said it suited April weather. Professor Goudie received her A. B. from the University of Minnesota and her A. M. and Ph. D. from the University of Indiana. After two years as an instructor of English at Bethany College she joined the faculty of Wichita State University in 1968 and is an assistant professor in their Department of English. Her special interests, apart from nineteenth and twentieth century American literature in general, are Thoreau, Melville, and Dickinson.
SOME THREE YEARS AGO we published an article, "Huck Finn and Mr. Mark Twain Rhyme," detailing the virtuosity, the fiendish ingenuity, with which Huck's creator made his lines chime and rhyme. Once a Twain enthusiast always a Twain enthusiast. Not surprisingly, ROBERT L. COARD is back with a piece about Twain, this time comparing Colonel Sellers of The Gilded Age with Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. In gilded ages successful adaptation would seem to involve a very similar quality of gilt. Back in July 1969 we noted that Professor Coard has a Ph. D. from the University of Illinois, has published widely in the journals, and since 1960 has been at St. Cloud (Minnesota) State College, where he is a professor of English. Recently he has become one of the advisory editors to the Sinclair Lewis Newsletter edited at St. Cloud by James Lundquist and has had articles in each of the three members that have appeared so far.
FOR OUR ELEVEN POEMS (and why eleven? perhaps to prove that we don't have to have a dozen, although we could if we liked), we have four poets old and two poets new. The latter are new only to us, of course, for where they speak modestly of their accomplishments we judge by looking at their poems that they have worked long and successfully at their craft. BILL MEISSNER, a young man of twenty-three, is in the University of Massachusetts MFA program, has received two University Fellowships in that program, and will be graduating almost at the same time he receives his copies of this issue. A Midwesterner like us, he grew up in Iowa and Wisconsin, took his B. S. in English at Wisconsin State University- Stevens Point, and in his senior year edited Cold Duck, an anthology for the nine Wisconsin state universities. His poems have appeared in a number of magazines, including Field, Shenandoah, New Orleans Review, The Fiddlehead, Beloit Poetry Journal, and some two dozen other journals, and his article on Sylvia Plath has been accepted for The Sewanee Review. Last May one of his poems won honorable mention in the Dorothy Rosenberg Annual Poetry Award (Marblehead, Massachusetts) . . . JOE PADDOCK has an A. B. in philosophy from the University of Minnesota and uses his parttime occupations as trapper-collector and group worker with delinquent boys to support his writing activities. His poems have appeared in such literary quarterlies as Crazy Horse and The Minnesota Review, and he has published some outdoor and nature writing in national magazines.
THE POETRY of CHARLES EDWARD EATON has been appearing in our pages since way back in January, 1965; by our count this will be the sixth such appearance. His latest book of poems, On the Edge of the Knife, has received two distinguished prizes, the Oscar Arnold Young Memorial Award for the best book of poems published in the previous year, given by the North Carolina Poetry Council, and the Roanoke Chowan Poetry Cup awarded by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. One of his stories, first published in The Sewanee Review, will be included in the 1972 edition of the O. Henry Prize Stories, and with this he assures us his cup is indeed running over. . . . From Oberlin College STUART FRIEBERT writes that his Calming Down, a chapbook of eleven poems, appeared in 1970 with Triskelion Press, recent poems have appeared in Quarterly Review of Literature, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Neutralität (Switzerland), and he had an essay on Karl Krolow in Germanic Notes. Speaking of old friends, we note that Professor Friebert's first poem in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY came out in the July 1963 issue, and this is his eighth appearance with us. . . . Although we became acquainted with NORMAN H. RUSSELL as recently as the July 1970 issue, this poet-professor of botany at Central State College, Edmond, Oklahoma, has become a regular, and we have been happy to use a number of his distinctive Indian poems. The present series began with the issue of last January and will conclude only with the July issue. . . . DAVID JEDDIE SMITH is making a second appearance with us. His first full-length book of poems, to be published by Basilisk Press, is expected to be out this summer; the title, Mean Rufus Throw Down, is a reference to a catcher's throw down to second base as a runner attempts to steal. He looks forward to receiving his discharge from the United States Air Force in time to enter graduate school in September, is expecting a second child shortly after this April child of ours comes out, and has had poems accepted by The Nation and Poetry Northwest.
BRIEF REVIEWS in this April issue are by Editor Rebecca Patterson and Poetry Editor Michael Heffernan.
Recommended Citation
Horn, John L.; Winthrop, Henry; Christenson, Ron; Frierson, James G.; Goudie, Andrea; Coard, Robert L.; Friebert, Stuart; Russell, Norman H.; Smith, David Jeddie; Meissner, Bill; Paddock, Joe; Eaton, Charles Edward; and Midwest Quarterly Editors
(1972)
"The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 13 No. 3,"
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 13:
Iss.
3, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol13/iss3/1