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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

Articles

Dreams, Economics, and Politics Along the Columbia

Our Political Gap in Latin America

Mexico's Hands-Off Policy

The U.N. and Our National Interest

Philosophy and the Missing Purpose

Hart Crane: Vitality as Credo in "Atlantis"

Verse

Each with Values

For the Mill Creek Swimmers

The Vortex

The Death of a Dolphin

In Brandywine (Hart Crane)

The Game

Fire in an Asylum

Abstract

in this issue...

WHILE critical comments on our January issue were uniformly favorable and even flattering, the editors were conscious of a sort of unspoken criticism of its rather narrow concentration of subject matter. Certainly Sherwood Anderson, Winston Churchill, William Dean Howells, and William Allen White are all significant figures in American life and letters, but a journal of contemporary thought ought to have more than one article per issue treating current problems. A quick glance at the table of contents of this issue will indicate that THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY is not about to lose its franchise. The first four articles treat the general area of United States relations with her neighbors north and south and with the world organization of the United Nations. The other two articles treat literary and philosophical subjects of less general but fairly permanent interest.

TOURISTS into the great American Northwest find it impossible to avoid the Columbia River and its giant dams at Bonneville, the Dalles, and Grand Coulee. What is not immediately apparent until one crosses the international boundary line into Canada is that this river drains not only parts of seven of the United States but also a substantial portion of the Canadian province of British Columbia. From this fact arises JOHN MANNING'S discussion of problems growing out of joint Canadian-United States efforts to harness the power potential of the Columbia to the mutual satisfaction of both nations. The author is associate professor in the department of humanities, University College, Michigan State University at East Lansing. He has taught in both Canada and the United States and has been associated with Michigan State since 1947. His degrees are from Queens University, Kingston, Ontario (Honors in English and history, first class, and the Master of Arts), and the University of Toronto ( Doctor of Philosophy). Understandably, he is primarily interested in Canadian history and Canada's relationship with the United States. For the past seven years he has served on a committee to arrange numerous seminars at East Lansing on Canadian- American relations, and he has published numerous articles in scholarly journals, including The Colorado Quarterly in 1959 and again in 1961. In 1960, the Canadian Council for research and productive scholarship in the field of Canadian-American relations awarded Professor Manning a grant to encourage and assist his studies. Besides articles and studies in education, he has published several discussions and a full-length book on Charles Dickens. This summer he will lecture at the University of Manitoba at Winnipeg.

UNITED STATES citizens generally have at least a smattering of ignorance about our neighbor on the north, but when it comes to Latin American nations and peoples, we venture into terra incognita. Along with President John F. Kennedy, JAMES L. BUSEY, associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado, is convinced that we ought to know more about Latin America and do very much more than we are currently attempting to assist and encourage the development of democratic governments and institutions down there. Professor Busey, who earned his Ph.D. at Ohio State University ten years ago, is the author of numerous articles and papers on Central and South American subjects. These have been published in a variety of journals from The Americas, Historia Mexicana, and Social Studies to The Western Political Quarterly. His article, "The Mexican Border, If Any," which originally appeared in The Colorado Quarterly, winter, 1959, was reprinted in Best Articles and Stories, April, 1960. His monograph, Notes on Costa Rican Democracy, will shortly be published by the University of Colorado Press.

WHILE Latin America in general concerns Professor Busey, what worries JAMES C. CAREY is American misunderstanding of Mexican foreign policy, particularly since the recent Punta del Este Conference in Uruguay. Currently on sabbatical leave from Kansas State University, Manhattan, where he has been a member of the history faculty since 1948, Professor Carey submitted his manuscript from Cuernavaca in Morelos Province, about thirty miles south of Mexico City. From there he goes to Peru to continue research into United States-Peruvian relations. No stranger to Latin America, he worked in Callao, Peru, for five years (1941-1945) as director of the Colegio America del Callao and Callao Public Library and as an elected member of the City Council there. Born in Nebraska, Carey completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Colorado in 1948. In 1955 he was visiting professor at the Pan-American College in Monterrey, Mexico, and while there also lectured at the University of Nuevo Leon. He was a member of the national council of the American Association of University Professors, 1953 to 1957, and at present is a member of the national council of Phi Alpha Theta, the national honor society in history.

AMERICANS from time to time seem to forget that the United States played a major role in the organization of the United Nations and that the U. S. Senate was the first legislative body to ratify the U. N. Charter, some seventeen years ago this summer. Occasionally American neo-isolationists suggest the wisdom of our withdrawing from this world organization, arguing that it is more hindrance than help in the implementation of American foreign policy. EDWIN C. HOYT disagrees with this point of view completely. A native New Yorker, he has the Bachelor of Arts (1938) and Bachelor of Laws (1942) degrees from Harvard and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Columbia (1958). From 1947 to 1954 he practiced law in New York City, first as Assistant District Attorney for New York County, then with a firm in general corporate practice. He returned to Columbia in 1954 to do graduate work in international law and relations, taught at Columbia and at Hamilton College, and spent a year as a research fellow in international law at the University of Michigan Law School before going to the University of New Mexico in September, 1960, as associate professor and chairman of the department of government. He has published a book, The Unanimity Rule in the Revision of Treaties (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), and several articles in The American Journal of International Law, Conflict Resolution, and India Quarterly. He is president of the Albuquerque Association for the United Nations.

"HAVING noticed the lack of philosophical contributions to the Quarterly," R. D. LAKIN, formerly of the language and literature faculty here and now a member of the department of English at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, wrote us last September to contribute his informative discussion of the present state of philosophy, a subject long a favorite with him. Readers of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY will recall that Professor Lakin' s work has twice before appeared in our pages: "Unity and Strife in Yeats' Tower Symbol" (July, 1960) and "Mark Twain and the Cold War" (January, 1961). He holds the Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude from Colorado College, Colorado Springs, where he majored in philosophy and literature; he received his Master of Arts degree with a major in philosophy and a minor in history at the University of Illinois, where he was a fellow in philosophy.

ALTHOUGH Hart Crane is well known and much admired among specialists in American Literature, he has not enjoyed a wide following among Americans in general. RICHARD H. RUPP here analyzes one of Crane's best known works. The editors of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY found his analysis so clear as to make familiarity with the poem unnecessary to an understanding of his discussion. Mr. Rupp is an instructor in the department of English at Georgetown University, Washington, D. C. A Hoosier, he was graduated from Notre Dame in 1956 and received his Master of Arts degree there in 1957. Currently he is a doctoral candidate at Indiana University and is doing his dissertation on Elizabeth Bowen's eight novels.

THE six poets whose work appears in this issue are new to THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY but hardly unknown in the field of modern poetry. ARNOLD FALLEDER is a New Yorker born in Brooklyn, a graduate of Hunter College, and a man with wide experience including professional swimming instruction, playwriting, farm labor, and library work at New York University. Thanks to his writing of opera librettos, he took part in the Ford Foundation Composers Forum at the New York City Center. He is a member of the Poetry Society of America and his work has appeared in The Humanist, The Fiddlehead, The Morningsider, and other journals here and in Canada. Last year some of his work was selected for the special spring (American Poets) number of La Voix des Poetes de Paris. . . . HAROLD ISBELL is currently teaching two sections of freshman English on a graduate fellowship at Notre Dame. His home is "a rather sleepy Iowa river town by the name of Bellevue"; he is a graduate of Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. He works summers as counselor at Father Flanagan's Boys' Home of Boys Town, Nebraska. . . . JOSEPH JOEL KEITH has published poems and critical reviews in a wide variety of publications from Mutiny to The National Review. He has made recordings of his poetry for the Library of Congress, and his books include The Stubborn Root and Two Laughsters. He participated in the Eighth Annual Pacific Coast Writers Conference in 1960, has won an enviable reputation in poetry workshops from Los Angeles to New England, and was recently appointed to the Advisory Board of the Affiliated Societies of the Academy of American Poets. The fall-winter issue of Mutiny featured his appraisal of eight poets, "Spotlighting Excellence." . . . ROBERT W. KING has a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing from the State University of Iowa and a Master of Arts in English from Colorado State University, Fort Collins. He is presently "writing poems in a soft fury" in the fastness of southwestern Montana. . . . JAMES KNIGHT was born and raised in Virginia, shipped out of Norfolk as a merchant seaman at the age of seventeen, and has been going to sea ever since with the exception of three years in the U.S. Marine Corps. He now lives in New York City, and his verses have appeared in a variety of poetry magazines and literary reviews. . . . ROBERT LEWIS WEEKS is professor of English at Wisconsin State College at Eau Claire. His Doctor of Philosophy degree is in eighteenth century English literature from Indiana University, but he has given up that specialty for modern American literature. Although he has been writing poetry for only three years, his poems have been widely published in journals from Epos to The Humanist. He reviews regularly for Prairie Schooner.

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