The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought
Contents
Prose
A General Proposal: Alternative to Futility
The Case of Harold Rugg
Warsaw in the Sixties
The Welfare State: Soviet Ideology and Practice
Captain Charles King, U.S.A.
A Kansas Romance of the Gay Nineties
Poems
New Generation
Skyed Always
Dissertation on Durrellian Adjectives Found Floating in and Around Alexandria
Abstract
in this issue...
AS THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY begins its third year of publication, the editors present an issue containing articles on our customarily wide variety of subjects. In this issue, however, we present our first discussions of American education. In view of the fact that this journal is the successor to The Educational Leader published by this college for over twenty years, it may seem a little strange that it has taken us so long to arrive at this point. The explanation is an easy one: we have made it a rule to use only the best of all the manuscripts submitted to us, and the first two articles in this number are the first of many manuscripts in the general area of education to meet what we consider to be our high standards. The second brace of articles deals with two somewhat related aspects of contemporary European life. The last two articles treat unrelated areas of western American life and letters.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY has proclaimed November 5 through 11 as American Education Week, according to recent advice from the Washington office of the National Education Association. It therefore seems entirely appropriate that the first two articles in our fall issue should be concerned with two aspects of American education. The first of these looks ahead to make proposals for careful and intelligent planning on the basis of past experience and future needs. The author, LLOYD P. WILLIAMS, is associate professor of educational philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at North Texas State College and his Ph.D. at the University of Texas. He has taught at Ohio State University in addition to Austin and Norman, and he was for a time Dean of Liberal Arts at Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio. He is the author of numerous articles and book reviews; The Educational Forum recently published his "Essay on the Value of Tradition."
FRANKLIN PARKER's article on Harold Rugg was his 1960 presidential address before the Southwest Philosophy of Education Society. Professor Parker attended Berea College in Kentucky, the University of Illinois, and George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee. Since 1958 he has taught at the University of Texas in the Department of History and Philosophy of Education. As Kappa Delta Pi Fellow in International Education, 1957- 58 he did research in Africa which resulted in his book, African Development and Education in Southern Rhodesia, published in 1960 by the Ohio State University Press. Currently, he has a Fulbright grant for research on Mass Media Effects on Africans in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. He has contributed articles on Africa to the Encyclopedia Americana Annual and to other publications. He recently contributed to the book, John Dewey: Master Educator, edited by William W. Brickman and published earlier this year by The Society for the Advancement of Education.
NEARLY EVERY LITERATE AMERICAN has read a dozen or more articles on Berlin in the past decade, but discussions of another historic European city lying some three hundred miles east of the German capital are relatively rare. Warsaw is over four hundred miles inside the Iron Curtain, which helps to explain the general dearth of observations on attitudes and conditions there. When WILLIAM M. PANTER approached us last summer with a comprehensive and unusual report of his visit to the ancient Polish capital, we were quick to welcome him and it. A native Sooner, Mr. Panter did his undergraduate work in history at Northeastern Oklahoma State College, Tahlequah, after which he earned the master of arts degree in history at George Peabody College in Nashville and carried on advanced study at Harvard and Vanderbilt universities. Since 1957 he has been an instructor in the department of education and psychology at Kansas State College of Pittsburg, teaching ninth and tenth grade social studies in College High laboratory school. In May of 1959 he left here for a fourteen-month sojourn to Scheveningen, Holland, where he was headmaster of a private school organized for the American community in that part of the Netherlands. While in Europe, he travelled widely with his wife and small son, visiting some eighteen countries including Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and Yugoslavia. During the summer of 1960, just before returning to the States, he ventured alone into East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. His report here published is one of the fruits of that expedition.
WHILE KAREL HULIKA did not visit Soviet Russia last summer, he is still highly qualified by experience and training to discuss many facets of Russian economy and politics. Readers of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY will recognize him as the author of "Soviet Nationality Policy" which we published last January (Volume II, Number 2). A native of Prague, Czechoslovakia, he was educated there and in the United States. He holds the Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at the universities of Minnesota and Oklahoma before joining the faculty of the University of Buffalo, New York, where he is associate professor of history and government. He has written many articles on various aspects of Soviet life; these have appeared in American, European and African publications including Land Economics, Adult Leadership, The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, Soviet Studies, The Journal of Politics, and The South African Journal of Economics. The editors are pleased to present his second contribution to this journal, a careful analysis of the theory and practice of Russian welfare state policies.
KING, CHARLES (1844-1933), army officer in the Civil War, various Indian campaigns, and the Spanish-American War. Besides military accounts of frontier encounters, he wrote books for boys, and such novels as The Colonel's Daughter (1883), A War-Time Wooing (1888), and Under Fire (1894)." That is all The Oxford Companion to American Literature has to say about this almost completely forgotten writer, and The Cambridge History of American Literature gives him only passing mention. SAMUEL J. SACKETT, however, has found him worth reading and considering, if only because King offers some clues to the answer of the old question: why does an author highly popular with his contemporaries fade away and become an unknown two or three generations later? Professor Sackett is a Californian by birth and up-bringing and a Kansan by adoption. He holds the bachelor and master of arts degrees from the University of Redlands and the doctor of philosophy from the University of California at Los Angeles. A member of the English department at Fort Hays Kansas State College since 1954, he is associate professor there and active in the American Folklore Association. His primary interest is Kansas literature and folklore, and with Professor William Koch of Kansas State University at Manhattan he is co-editor of Kansas Folklore, a volume scheduled for November publication by the University of Nebraska Press.
THE LAST ARTICLE in this issue-and our fourth contribution to the observation of the centennial of Kansas Statehood-is a product of that friendly co-operation which frequently makes the historian's lot a happy one. Several years ago while working on his doctoral dissertation, a study of the career of Samuel J. Crawford who was elected governor of Kansas in 1864, Mark A. Plummer, then a graduate student at the University of Kansas, discovered two journals kept by a pair of Kansas lovers in the early 1890's. Knowing that HOMER E. SOCOLOFSKY, associate professor of history at Kansas State University, was deep in research on the life of Arthur Capper, journalist and long-time U. S. Senator, Mr. Plummer told Professor Socolofsky of their existence. These journals had been written by Florence Crawford, the governor's daughter, and young Capper during a period of enforced separation. After having been lost to the world for more than half a century, the journals finally turned up in the Capper library after it had been purchased by the Capper Foundation for Crippled Children. They are now in the possession of Professor Socolofsky who plans to place them with other Capper materials in the library of the Kansas State Historical Society of whose board of directors the professor is a member. The article here published was prepared originally to be read at the annual meeting of the Kansas Association of Teachers of History and Social Science at the University of Kansas last May.
Professor Socolofsky's major interests are western agricultural an land history. His doctoral dissertation at the University of Missouri dealt with "The Capper Farm Press"; that led him into further work which will be crowned later this year by the publication of a biography, Arthur Capper of Kansas. Its author is active in a variety of professional organizations including the Agricultural History Society, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and Phi Alpha Theta the national honor society in history. He is a member of the Kansas Centennial Commission and vice-president of the Rile County Historical Society. Last summer the Nebraska Historic Society granted him one of its Woods Fellowships to enable him t pursue his research in western land disposal and use.
THE THREE POEMS in this issue have little in common with one another: they treat widely unrelated matters, and they are the products of poets as widely separated geographically. "Skyed Always" is by EMILIE GLEN of New York whose short stories an poems have appeared in several anthologies including New Directions--14, Best American Short Stories--1952, New Voices, and Anthology of American Poets. Her work has been published rather extensively, in Best Article & Stories, the Kansas Magazine, The New Mexico Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Western Humanities Review, and other journals. She served on the staff The New Yorker for several years and has edited a Congregational Church magazine. Married and the mother of a little girl, she is a member of the Poetry Society of America and the American Creative Theater in which she performs minor roles in off-Broadway productions. L. W. MICHAELSON, who teaches English at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, was born and raised in the Centennial State but managed to tear himself away from the mountains long enough to study writing with Paul Engle and Robert Bowen at the State University of Iowa at Iowa City and with Vincent McHugh at the University of Denver. Some of his light verse has appeared in Phoenix Nest and The Saturday Review, and he has also been published in The Christian Century, Esquire, and The Saturday Evening Post as well as "most all the college quarterlies." His short story, "The Ferrari," which first appeared in Prairie Schooner, was reprinted in Best Articles & Stories and will soon be produced as a play. This past summer he was poetry lecturer at the University of Santa Clara's first creative writing conference. His contribution to this journal is a verse criticism of the celebrated Alexandria quartet of novels by Lawrence Durrell. "New Generation" is another poem by MARION SCHOEBERLEIN of Illinois whose first MIDWEST QUARTERLY appearance was in our July issue.
Recommended Citation
Williams, Lloyd P.; Schoeberlein, Marion; Parker, Franklin; Panter, William M.; Hulicka, Karel; Glen, Emilie; Sackett, S. J.; Socolofsky, Homer E.; Michaelson, L. W.; and Midwest Quarterly Editors
(1961)
"The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 3 No.1,"
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 3:
Iss.
1, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol3/iss1/1