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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

Containing Communism with Communism

Technique and Society

Professors, Politics and the Government

McLuhanism: A Massage that Muddles

Narrow-Gauge Railroads in the Mid-Mississippi Valley: Frustrations and Opportunities for Histories

Birth of a Notion: Edward Stratemeyer and the Movies

VERSE

A Retreat to Buffalo

The Assignment

Russia

What Dreams in the Deepest Sleep

A Rise of Light

High Road

Sudden Rain

Two Worlds

Pastoral

Capuccini

Textual Matters

The Departure

Abstract

in this issue. . .

ANTICIPATING a presidential election, with its quadrennial testing of national purpose, shortly after the appearance of this October 1972 issue of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY, we call attention to the timeliness of articles dealing with the American dilemma in Southeast Asia, the cultural strain of an expanding technology, the brain glut of unemployed scientists as a special instance of that strain, and the evidence, slight as yet but worrisome, of a new barbarism bred by what the McLuhanites call the "cool" medium TV. This timeliness is part luck and part planning. Out of the ever increasing flow of manuscripts across our desk there are always more than enough to sound our particular note. And when we have done our stint of worrying about the state of the nation and of the world, we can tum with pleasant nostalgia to some such special interest as the bygone days of railroading or the authorship of the Rover Boys and the Tom Swift books.

MILITARY disengagement from Southeast Asia, as DONALD E. SECREST points out in his proposal for "containing communism with communism," will be challenging and hazardous for the United States. Choosing the best alternative for domestic peace as well as the peace of the world will tax the brains of whatever Administration is returned to office this coming November. Our author is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, where he has been teaching since 1965, specializing in international relations and centering his research on American policy toward the Third World. The article in this October issue was presented earlier this year at a meeting of the Southeast Social Science Association. An earlier article on "Dulles and Arab Neutralism" appeared in the Welsh journal Interstate. Professor Secrest took his B. S. degree at Wayne State University and his Ph. D. degree at the University of Michigan.

SOME YEARS AGO, between the acceptance of an earlier article on technology and its publication in the October 1968 issue, author STEBELTON H. NULLE wrote to us that he had "ineluctably turned professor emeritus" at Michigan State University. Four years to the month he returns with undiminished vigor and with a fresh look at technology and our sometimes irrational attitudes about it. Indeed he seems to us, despite his reservations and warnings of social costs, to be somewhat more hopeful about our future in a regulated world. We might add that prior to his retirement Professor Nulle taught in the humanities department of Michigan State University. Earlier, he had taught political and constitutional history at New York University and Vassar College.

ENCLOSED with the manuscript of "Professors, Politics, and the Government" came a Bill Mauldin cartoon of a young scientist busying himself in his home laboratory with bottles, beakers, retorts, and books entitled TNT: How It Is Made and Used, Plastic Explosives, and other menacing volumes. Peering in through the half-open door, the student's father says to the mother, "I had no idea he was interested in politics." That unemployed young scientists might begin to take an interest in blow-hot, blow-cold politics is a possibility suggested by authors CLIFFORD E. LANDERS and ARTHUR E. NUDELMAN in this study of high-level technological unemployment. Co-author Landers received his Ph. D. from the University of Florida. He is currently associate professor of political science at Jersey City State College, having previously taught at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and at Sam Houston State University of Huntsville, Texas. His articles have appeared in Land Economics, New Republic, and American Sociologist. He is now at work on two articles dealing with Colombian politics and a book on the National Front in Colombia, 1958-1972. As of this fall, co-author Nudelman is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Old Dominion University, and the Eastern Virginia Medical School, both in Norfolk. He previously taught at Florida State University, Tallahassee. His B. A. with High Honors is from the University of Florida, his M. S. and Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His articles have appeared in Mental Hygiene, Review of Religious Research, Psychological Reports, Social Science & Medicine, and other journals.

WORDs like ''hot medium," "cool medium," "linear" type theory, "global village," and the like, which have hitherto been a meaningless buzz in our ears, are now sorted out and made meaningful for us by the lucid exposition of RICHARD GAMBINO (not that we aren't still a little puzzled as to why print should be ''hot'' and TV "cool," when we would have chosen "engaged" and "passive"). Author Gambino earned his B. A. at Queens College of The City University of New York, his M. A. at the University of Illinois, and his Ph. D. at New York University. He has held various teaching positions at the University of Illinois, at City College, and most recently at Queens College, where he is now an assistant professor in the department of education. For some years he was Leader in the New York Society for Ethical Culture, and he has held a number of offices in other organizations and is a member of several learned societies. His articles on humanism, education, democracy, ethics, and social psychology have appeared in such journals as Today, Ethical, Outlook, The Personalist, Religious Humanism, and others, and he has published a book, Crime and Punishment: Towards a Policy for Our Time, and has another book, Mental Disorder and Criminal Responsibility, awaiting publication.

RETURNING for the third time to our pages, LEE A. DEW strikes a somewhat different note with his account of the narrow-gauge railroads which laced the Mid-Mississippi Valley not so many years ago, and with his suggestions as to what the train buff and the amateur historian might do to rescue this important page of our history before it has faded completely away. A graduate of our own Kansas State College, Lee Dew is a professor and a somewhat reluctant chairman of the department of history and political science of Kentucky Wesleyan College at Owensboro. He continues his research on narrow-gauge railroads, has an article on the Arkansas lines coming out in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, and is at work on another article about a narrow-gauge railroad operated by the Glenmore distillery which he expects to call "The 100-Proof Railroad."

ANOTHER returning contributor is PETER A. SODERBERGH, whose article on Upton Sinclair was in our Winter 1970 issue. His current subject is Edward Stratemeyer, hack writer of many aliases, who created, among others, such successful young people's series as The Rover Boys, Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Ruth Fielding. The particular concern of this article, however, is the ingenious use Stratemeyer made of the newfangled cinema growing up in time with his Ruth Fielding and Tom Swift. Peter Soderbergh is a professor in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh, teaches the only history of American films course at Pitt, has had articles recently in Rutgers Alumni Magazine, Clearing House, the Illinois Historical Society Journal, Grade Teacher, Bulletin des Freres des Ecoles Chretiennes, and has an article coming out in the Fall Florida Historical Quarterly.

AMONG OUR POETS we welcome back BERNICE AMES, RAY AMOROSI, RAYMOND CARVER, RICHARD GUSTAFSON, JAMES HEARST and TOM O'LEARY. . . . This, we believe, is a seventh appearance for Bernice Ames of Los Angeles. She was the winner of the Cecil Hemley Award for 1971 given by the Poetry Society of America and has had poems recently in West Coast Review, Nimrod, Arizona Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly, Fiddlehead, Chicago Tribune, Outposts (England), Wisconsin Review, Yankee and Spirit. . . . Ray Amorosi writes from North Adams, Massachusetts, that he has poems in recent or forthcoming issues of Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, Choice, Carolina Quarterly, and Far Point, and his first book of poems, Marie Guardellajo and the Borgia Pearl, will be published by the Bum Dream Press in Boston. . . . Since September Raymond Carver has been Visiting Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, on leave from Santa Cruz. He has several stories published or about to be published in such journals as Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Northwest Review, North American Review, and others, and has appeared in a number of anthologies, including Best Little Magazine Fiction 1970 and 1971. He has had poems in Transatlantic Review, Esquire, Chelsea Prairie Schooner, and other journals. His book of poems, Winter Insomnia, was published last year by Kayak Press. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts award for poetry and a Joseph Henry Jackson award for fiction, and he has just won a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Award from Stanford for next year. . . . Richard Gustafson writes from Iowa State University that he is still editing Poet & Critic but has nothing else to report except ''too much committee work" . . . James Hearst is still in the English department of the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, and is still "publishing a few poems," he writes, one of which appeared in the January Ladies Home Journal. . . . Tom O'Leary was in town recently (en route to Mexico) as guest of poetry editor Michael Heffernan, and this editor had the pleasure of meeting him. Presumably he has now found, or despaired of, that inexpensive poetic haven he was seeking in Mexico.

THE NEW POETS, though fewer in number this time, are as welcome as if they were a host, and indeed we propose to regard each one of them as a host in himself. GERALD COSTANZO is an assistant professor of English at the Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, where he teaches creative writing. Other new poems of his have appeared or will soon appear in Prairie Schooner, Kansas Quarterly, The Ohio Review, Mundus Artium, and Southern Poetry Review. Recently he received a Scaife grant for writing. . . . BEN HOWARD earned his B. A. degree at Drake University, studied at Leeds University (England), then turned to Syracuse University for his M. A. and Ph. D. He has taught at Syracuse and is now in the English department at Alfred University, where he teaches creative writing, poetry, British literature-and the classical guitar. His poems have appeared in the South Dakota Review, motive, The Lamp in the Spine, and Intro No. 1 (an anthology, published by Bantam), and he has had a review in Epoch and a critical article in Thoth. . . . Our last poet, S. J. MARKS, is a graduate of the University of Chicago, holds the M. F. A. from the University of Iowa, and has studied at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry and other mental health institutes, including a year in the Mental Health Worker Training Program of Philadelphia State Hospital. For some years he taught English at Temple University. He now works as a group psychotherapist and counselor at Philadelphia State Hospital, teaches in the Group Relations Ongoing Workshops in New York and is co-editor of The American Poetry Review. Somehow he has found time to write a considerable body of poetry which has appeared in such journals as Chicago Review, Choice, Existential Psychiatry, The Iowa Review, Minnesota Review, The New Yorker, the New York Times, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Provincetown Review, The Seneca Review, Transpacific, and others. He has also published a number of essays, has collaborated in a translation from the work of Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti, and has edited and co-edited, authored and co-authored a number of books for such publishing houses as Dell, Fawcett-Crest, Scott, Foresman & Co., and Harper & Row.

OUR BRIEF REVIEW is by Poetry Editor MICHAEL HEFFERNAN.

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