The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought
Contents
Articles
Israelites with Egyptian Principles
Thomas Hart Benton: The First Civil War Revisionist
The New Deal Through Alf Landon's Eyes
The Agrarian Tradition and Urban Problems
Some Question and Answers on Musicology
Emily Dickinson's Palette (II)
Verse
Leaf Smoke
Till Computers
Make Love
Black Muslim Boy in a Hospital
Homesick in a River Town
Live from New York
Helen of Argos
Before Playing a Call (After the Manner of the Japanese)
Slender Arcs
The Poet at His Desk
House Visit
Waiting Bench with Figure
Summer's Gone
Abstract
in this issue. . .
LOOKING FORWARD as we began Volume V a year ago, we predicted "a number of articles on aspects of American politics, American foreign policy, and American internal problems" in our issues for 1964. Our record demonstrates the accuracy of our prediction. So for that matter do the contents of this issue. From Edmund Wilson to Emily Dickinson, from Thomas Hart Benton (the Missouri Senator, not the Missouri artist) to Alf Landon, from the agrarian myth to the relatively new discipline of musicology, we present another diverse combination of discussions for your fall fare. CERTAINLY no subject draws and requires more interest and deeper concern in the United States today than the civil rights revolution, the struggle by and for American Negroes to win equality of opportunity and treatment in this nation "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." After reading our issue for last January--which began with three reports on the Washington Jobs-and-Freedom March of August, 1963--HOWARD N. MEYER of Long Island congratulated us for publishing "an abolitionist journal." More important, he submitted a lengthy brief taking sharp and deep exception to the wide waves of acclaim which greeted the 1962 publication of Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore. The editors reached unusual unanimity with alacrity. Mr. Meyer is a Harvard-trained New York attorney and civil rights historian who has written for The Commonweal, New South, The Crisis, and The Negro Digest, and edited the 1962 Collier Books re-issue of Thomas Wentworth Higginson' s classic, Army Life in a Black Regiment. His new biography of Ulysses S. Grant will soon be published by Macmillan. In May Mr. Meyer read portions of his article here published at a meeting of the Amistad Society in Chicago, and over one hundred stations of the National Educational Radio Network in thirty-one states coast-to-coast have carried his cogent arguments that American Negro history has been largely misunderstood, neglected, and/ or ignored.
EXTREMISM is a word rather widely (and wildly) used in recent months. Historical perspective shows that there have been extremists before in our history, particularly in that era just preceding the American Civil War. Among the strong men of that period of sectional disturbance and distrust, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri stands out. E. B. SMITH, professor of history at Iowa State University at Ames, brings Benton into new focus as a man who placed nation above section and strove against overwhelming odds for rational solutions to the national problems of his time. Professor Smith wrote Magnificent Missourian, The Life of Thomas Hart Benton (Lippincott, 1958) and has contributed articles to American Heritage, The American Historical Review, The Japanese Quarterly, and The Missouri Historical Review: His pamphlet, The Making of American Farm Policy, was published in Japanese and English by the U. S. Information Service in 1956. His A. B. (cum laude) is from Maryville College, Tennessee, and his A. M. and Ph.D. are from the University of Chicago. After eight years at Youngstown University, Ohio, he moved in 1957 to Iowa State. During the summers of 1951-52 he worked with the U. S. Department of State, and in 1954-55 he was Fulbright Visiting Professor to Ochanomizu University and the University of Tokyo. In 1962 he was an Iowa candidate for the U. S. Senate, barely losing out to Bourke Hickenlooper. This fall he is campaign co-ordinator for President Lyndon B. Johnson for the state of Iowa. His essay here published was originally read at the seventh annual Missouri Valley Conference of Collegiate Teachers of History at the University of Omaha last March.
SOME YEARS BACK a political science instructor here left the name "Alf Landon" on the blackboard of a classroom near this office. The next hour brought a history section to that room, and its instructor noticed the looks of mystification on the faces of the students as they observed the name. Quizzing the class (approximately eighty-five percent native Kansans) disclosed that only one of the fifty-odd students present could identify the man. This suggests the total eclipse, even in Kansas where he lives to this day, which the Republican presidential candidate of 1936 has suffered m the past quarter century. DONALD R. McCOY, professor of history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, has made a specialty of the 1930's (see his Angry Voices, Left of Center Politics in the New Deal Era, 1958) and recently completed a biography of Landon on which he had been working since 1958. Originally from Illinois, he taught at the American University and the New York State University College at Cortland and served on the staff of the National Archives in Washington before joining the University of Kansas faculty in 1957. This particular article he first read at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Social Science Association in Dallas last April.
APPORTIONMENT of representation is among the most controversial political subjects in the United States today, witness the angry mid-August Congressional reaction to recent Supreme Court decisions on state legislative seats. Underlying the whole structure of political representation is the ancient agrarian-urban dichotomy here examined by BILL G. REID, associate professor of history at East Central State College, Ada, Oklahoma. Professor Reid holds A. B. and A. M. degrees in history from Eastern New Mexico University at Portales and the Ph.D. in history from the University of Oklahoma, Norman, with additional graduate study at Brandeis University. He has presented papers at meetings of the Oklahoma History Professor's Association and the Southwest Political Science Association, published articles in The Journal of Mississippi History and (last July) Mid-America, and has received a research grant from the American Philosophical Society.
MUSICOLOGY is a relatively unfamiliar word and a discipline deserving much wider understanding and appreciation than it now enjoys. E. EUGENE HELM, a native of Louisiana now teaching music history and directing graduate research in music at the State University of Iowa, Iowa City, last winter sat down and put together a clear and persuasive explanation of his chosen field. When we examined the result of his efforts, one editor reacted: "Grab it! This man can write and he has something to say." We grabbed it. Professor Helm has the Ph.D. in musicology from North Texas State University, has appeared in various music journals, and the University of Oklahoma Press in 1960 published his first book, Music at the Court of Frederick the Great. He spent this past summer in grant-sponsored work on another book about the music of C. P. E. Bach (1714-1788), third son of Johann Sebastian.
CONCLUDING our fall articles is the conclusion of REBECCA P ATTERSON's pioneering examination of Emily Dickinson's use of color-words in her letters and poems. The first half of this study appeared in our summer literary number (V, 271-291) and evoked favorable, even enthusiastic, comment. Professor Patterson, our literary and poetry editor, is acting editor-in-chief during this fall semester while the editor is on sabbatical leave doing research in his favorite field, the American Civil War.
REVIEWING Rene Williamson's new book, Independence and Involvement: A Christian Reorientation in Political Science, just published by Louisiana State University Press, is our house poet, DONALD ATWELL ZOLL, associate professor of political science here.
TWELVE POEMS by twelve different poets comprise the rest of our autumn issue. Four of these carefully selected verse offerings are by men whose work has appeared in earlier numbers of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY: EDSEL FORD of Fort Smith, Arkansas, LEONARD GILLEY of Denver, Colorado, ROBERT LEWIS WEEKS of Nacogdoches, Texas, and JAMES WORLEY of Columbus, Indiana. Edsel Ford makes his fourth appearance in this issue with "Live From New York," a condition, he says, in which he is always surprised to return therefrom. What called him out of his bucolic refuge to go to Gotham was the announcement that he was recipient of the Lowell Mason Palmer Award from the Poetry Society of America this year, given annually for a poem on nature. . . . Leonard Gilley spent last summer presiding over a course in creative writing at the University of Denver. He reports that Linden Press of Baltimore has invited him to submit work for inclusion in a small anthology planned for next spring. He contributed "Fruit and Sympathy" to our autumn number last year. . . . Professor Weeks of Stephen F. Austin State College has been "publishing right along" since we ran "The Vortex" back in April, 1962. South & West will publish his "To the Maker of Gloves and Other Poems" soon. . . . James Worley's "Observed Near Jericho" appeared in our spring issue last April.
THE OTHER EIGHT appearing for the first time in this issue of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY range from as far east as Maine and as far west as California; only two come close to qualifying as midwestern in orientation. EUGENE BROOKS who practices law at Plainview, Long Island, and in New York City, has his A. B. from Montclair State Teachers College, New Jersey, his LL. B. and master of international law from New York University's Law Center. His work has appeared in The New York Times and Herald-Tribune, Lyric, The University Review (Kansas City), and Wings. He served with the U. S. Army Air Corps during World War II and has just finished an article on the jurisprudence of outer space. . . . A native of Alliance, Nebraska, JAMES A. EMANUEL is instructor in the department of English at The City College of New York. His A. B. is from Howard University, his A. M. from Northwestern, and his Ph. D. from Columbia. Included in his various experiences is a hitch in a C. C. C. camp at Wellington, Kansas, and an assignment as confidential aide to the assistant Inspector General (Benjamin O. Davis) of the U. S. Army. His articles, poems, and reviews have appeared in American Speech, Books Abroad, Negro Digest, The Negro History Bulletin, The New York Times, and Phylon. His poems have been anthologized in Sixes and Sevens, American Negro Poetry, and New Negro Poets: U. S. . . . DAVID PEARSON ETTER, assistant editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica in Evanston, Illinois, was born in California but decided to move to the Middle West after his first trip here at the age of eighteen. He majored in American history and English at the State University of Iowa and has lived and worked in Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri. His poems have appeared or will soon appear in Antioch Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Midwest, Minnesota Review, Prairie Schooner, San Francisco Review, and Wormwood, among others. . . . By contrast, SY KAHN, born and raised in New York, is now associate professor of English and humanities at Raymond College of the University of the Pacific at Stockton, California. His A. B. is from the University of Pennsylvania, his masters from Connecticut, and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He has been writing poetry for "over a quarter of a century" and has published regularly in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Bitterroot, Epos, Impetus, Lynx, The Green World, and Southern Poetry Today. In the summer of 1963 his first book of poems, Our Separate Darkness, appeared in Italy under the aegis of the Castle Continental Press, a continuation of the famous Black Sun Press of Paris in the twenties and thirties, run by Caresse and Harry Crosby. Caresse, still alive and flourishing at seventy-four, designed his book and wrote an introduction for it. Professor Kahn's critical article on Harry Crosby (1898-1929) will appear this fall in Poetry and Fiction of the Twenties, published by Everett Edwards Press. His "Slender Arcs" is the lead poem in a book just published by Raymond College. . . . Down at Los Angeles, MARY GRAHAM LUND works at articles and fiction and writes poems, she says "impulsively, compulsively, episodically, idiotically.'' Also successfully, we add: her work has appeared recently in The Christian Century, The Commonweal, Discourse, DePaul Literary Magazine, The Goliards, Prairie Schooner, and Wormwood. . . . Completing our trio of California poets in this issue is MARGARET BARBRICK PURCELL of Pasadena, who was born in Salem, Massachusetts not far from the Witchhouse and the House of Seven Gables. Her early education was in Hamilton, Bermuda, where she lived for six years. After moving to California, she attended Cumnock Academy and School of Expression, later studying piano and voice in Vienna. She has written a number of one-act plays which have won prizes and have been produced professionally in little theatres in Hollywood and Los Angeles. Well known as an interpreter of current plays and poetry reading programs, she now concentrates on poetry. Her poems have been published in newspapers and magazines, among them The American Bard, The Archer, Bitterroot, The Carmel Pine Cone, The Explorer, The Poetry Digest, Scimitar and Song, The Stepladder, The Villager, and The Westminster. . . . HOLLIS SUMMERS is a Kentucky-born novelist who has been at Ohio University, Athens, for the past six years. Her novels already published are: City Limit, Brighten the Corner, and The Weather of February. Last summer she finished a fourth, tentatively titled "The Day After Sunday.'' In 1959, Harper's published a collection of her poems, The Walks Near Athens. In 1961 Lippincott did a little book of her children's poems: Someone Else; Sixteen Poems about Other Children. This fall Rutgers University Press will publish another book of her poems, "Seven Occasions." She has been on the staffs of various writer's conferences including Bread Loaf and Antioch. . . . One of the three editors who founded the literary annual, Northeast, is JOHN STEVENS WADE of Temple, Maine, whose poetry has appeared in over fifty publications. His most recent appearances include: Canadian Forum, Cresset, The Dubliner, Forum, Galley Sail Review, Kansas Magazine, The New York Times, La Voix des Poetes (Paris), Literary Review, Targets, and Voices. Windfall Press in Chicago will bring out his third book of poetry soon.
Recommended Citation
Meyer, Howard N.; Smith, E. B.; McCoy, Donald R.; Reid, Bill G.; Helm, Ernest Eugene; Patterson, Rebecca; Weeks, Robert Lewis; Brooks, Eugene; Emanuel, James A.; Etter, David Pearson; Ford, Edsel; Gilley, Leonard; Purcell, Margaret B.; Kahn, Sy; Lund, Mary Graham; Wade, John Stevens; Summers, Hollis; and Worley, James
(1964)
"The Midwest Quarterly; Vol 6. No. 1,"
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 6:
Iss.
1, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol6/iss1/1