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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

Articles

The Liberal Arts in Retrospect

Francis Parkman, Historian

Abolitionism: Its Meaning for Contemporary American Reform

The South to Posterity!

Mormons, Mining, and the Golden Trumpet of Moroni

The Political Fiction of William Allen White: A Study in Emerging Progressivism

Reality Revisited

Verse

The Bearded Rebel

Night Drowning

Memorials (Fragments form Soldier's Graves)

Bestiary

The Temple of Mars

Puzzling

The Reply

The University, September 12

Thoreau Again

The Visit

The Cove at Dawn: La Jolla, California

The Land

Abstract

in this issue. . .

ANNUALLY, as summer ends and fall arrives, another academic year begins, and, for seven years now, THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY issues the first number of a new volume. Here is Number 1 of Volume VIII containing our usual variety and somewhat more. Occasionally recollecting our pedagogical mission, we turn to the field of education; more frequently we find space for an essay or two on history or historians, although subjects from American literature easily lead in any tabulation of our titles. We cannot say, with the late Somerset Maugham, "The mixture as before," nor can we hawk our wares as entirely novel, without precedent, unique. One fights a strong tendency toward nostalgia in this season; one longs for leisure for contemplation and reflection; one even contemplates the imagined pleasures of hibernation. One ultimately gets the copy to the printer.

PERENNIALLY, college and university faculties discuss and struggle over the need and composition of General Education programs. Just as often, there are those who advocate the “liberal arts" as the ne plus ultra of any respectable General Education curriculum. When CHARLES A. GLATT, then professor of education at New York State University College in Buffalo, sent us his review of what those “liberal arts" have variously been over the centuries, we thought his discussion peculiarly appropriate to the start of another academic year and potentially helpful to General Education Committees. Professor Glatt took his A. B. at the state university of his native Louisiana and then moved west for ten years and two advanced degrees (M.A. and Ph.D.) at the University of New Mexico. By academic preparation a sociologist, he works in educational history and philosophy. This fall he joined the College of Education faculty at Ohio State University where he will help develop the graduate program in educational sociology.

HISTORIANS come in all sizes and among the American giants is Francis Parkman (1823-1893). Never having been persuaded that ability to write well ought to be held against anyone, we were at once sympathetic to the pro-Parkman manuscript sent down from Iowa City last winter by John T. HUBBELL, doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illinois and since 1965 editor of Civil War History, a “Journal of the Middle Period” published by the University of Iowa. Mr. Hubbell’s bachelor’s degree is from Northeastern Oklahoma State College, his master’s from the University of Oklahoma. When he encountered the great historical contribution of Parkman, Mr. Hubbell was not only fascinated by the Harvard historian but irritated by the cavalier treatment he and other nineteenth-century literary historians have usually received. Axiom: Editors who are also historians tend to appreciate historians who can write.

ABOLITIONISTS have been fair game since the movement began: in the 1830’s they were hit by everything from ripe fruit and eggs to stones and bullets; historians have been throwing verbal brickbats and bouquets at them for over a century. BERTRAM WYATT-BROWN thinks it time for a more balanced look and a fairer evaluation; when we read his manuscript last March, we agreed. Now a member of the history department at Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Professor Wyatt-Brown has his A. B. from the University of the South (Sewanee), won his master’s from King’s College, Cambridge University, in 1961, and took his Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins University two years later under the tutelage of C. Vann Woodward, now at Yale. Before going to Western Reserve this fall, he taught history at Colorado State University and the University of Colorado. With articles appearing and scheduled to appear in Business History Review, The Journal of Negro History, and The Western Political Quarterly, he is completing a biography of the New York abolitionist-philanthropist, Lewis Tappan.

THE SOUTH, like those abolitionists, has attracted all manner of attention during the past century. Outstanding among historians of that region is DEWEY W. GRANTHAM, JR., professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He holds the A. B. from the University of his native Georgia, the M. A. and Ph. D. from the University of North Carolina; before going to Nashville in 1952, he had taught at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina and at North Texas State College (now University), Denton. He is the author of Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958) and The Democratic South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1963). His major interest is recent American history, and he is now at work on "The Progressive Movement in the South, 1900-1920."

SOMEWHAT balancing (with John Hubbell) our Southern contributors is BURTON J. WILLIAMS, assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, with two degrees from Southern Illinois University and the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. Professor Williams contributed an essay on the geographic determinism of James J. Ingalls to our April, 1965, issue and returns to us with another Ingalls curiosity, more fruit from his long interest and research in that nineteenth-century Kansas political figure. With his biography of Ingalls completed, Professor Williams is currently editing the senator's extensive and fabulous correspondence. Interested publishers may discover the flavor of Ingalls's rhetoric in his work here presented, typical of the flamboyant style popular in Kansas politics several generations ago.

OUTSTANDING among Kansas immortals is William Allen White, editor of The Emporia Gazette, essayist, novelist, and eager disciple of Theodore Roosevelt during and after the Progressive campaign of 1912. GEORGE L. GROMAN, assistant professor of English at the Newark, New Jersey, College of Arts and Sciences of Rutgers University, has compiled an anthology, "Political Literature of the Progressive Era," to be published next year by Michigan State University Press. One section of that work centers on White's fiction. Professor Groman won his A. B. and Ph. D. degrees from New York University and his M.A. from Columbia University. From 1957 to 1962 he taught at NYU, and in 1962-63 he enjoyed a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship. Before entering teaching he worked in publishing, first on the editorial staff of Columbia University Press, later in the editorial-production department of the Macmillan Company.

DISAGREEMENT on the nature of reality has been a hardy perennial among philosophers for centuries, and we were not at all surprised when Leonard Gilley's essay in our spring issue last April attracted numerous comments, both pro and con. Most articulate and incisive in the latter category is ALLAN J. ALLEN, chairman of the philosophy department at Slippery Rock State College in Pennsylvania; his doctorate (in philosophy) is from Indiana University.

LEONARD GILLEY's articles and poetry have appeared frequently in these pages; indeed, this issue contains two more of his poems in addition to his terse rejoinder to the Allen critique.

APPROPRIATELY, we offer the work of five new poets in this first issue of our new volume to balance in part a sextet of poets whose verse we have earlier published. New to our pages are, IMOGENE L. BOLLS, instructor in the Department of English at Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio; PHILIP E. BURNHAM, JR., assistant history chairman of a Newton, Massachusetts, high school; BARBARA FOWLER, lecturer in classics at the University of Wisconsin; KENNETH C. GAERTNER of the YM-YWCA staff in Ann Arbor, Michigan: and ROSE MENENDIAN of the staff of the Encyclopedia Britannica in Chicago. Those six more familiar to us through long association include, JESSE FORBECK of St. Louis, EDSEL FORD of Fort Smith, Arkansas, LEONARD GILLEY of Denver, EMILIE GLEN of Greenwich Village, MICHAEL PAUL NOVAK of Leavenworth, Kansas, and TRACY THOMPSON of Boise, Idaho.

ORIGINALLY from Kansas with her A. B. in English from the State University at Manhattan, Mrs. Nathan J. Bolls, Jr., has her master's from the University of Utah. During her undergraduate years she published some poetry but only recently resumed serious and successful efforts to get into print again. . . . Mr. Burnham was graduated from Harvard in 1960; after earning his master's at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy he entered the U. S. Foreign Service as vice consul in Marseille, France. His poems have appeared in Descant, The Laurel Review, and the Texas Christian literary journal. . . . Mrs. Murray Fowler has an A. B. from Wisconsin, her M.A. and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr, and studied at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. . . . Ken Gaertner quit high school to join the U. S. Marine Corps and since his discharge has worked on farms, in factories, in theatre, and at one time edited a radical Christian magazine, De Colores. His poems have appeared in The American Bard, The Christian Century, Flame, The Kansas City Star, Midwest, Tampa Poetry Review, and in The Anthology of American Poetry, Volume IV. . . . Rose Menendian Ashdaragentz was born in New York where she took her A. B. at Syracuse University. Although she has lived much of her life in Chicago, she has traveled throughout the United States and in Europe and North Africa. She has been on the EB staff for the past eight years.

BRINGING our readers up to date on our six regulars is an easy and happy task. Jesse Forbeck reports the publication of a short story of his in last summer's issue of The (Kansas City) University Review. . . . Edsel Ford continues to win wealth and fame: the $3,500 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for a work in progress, the Society Prize (judged by Mark Van Dorn) of the Poetry Society of Texas. He recently taped an hour’s reading of his poems at the invitation of the Library of Congress, and Homestead House has published a small volume of his, Love Is the House It Lives In, now in its second edition. The New Mexico Quarterly will include a long short story of his this fall, and more of his poems will shortly appear in The Literary Review, two anthologies, and elsewhere. . . . Our Mr. Novak won one of the Harcourt, Brace, and World fellowships to the Writers’ Conference in the Rocky Mountains this summer where he “received a great deal of encouragement from Rolphe Humphries and others.” Four Quarters, The Mad River Review, and The South Dakota Quarterly have recently accepted poems of his crafting.

. . . . Leonard Gilley continues to teach and write at the University of Denver. . . . And in mid-August Tracy Thompson joined the Humanities Department of Boise College; he has been teaching and writing in Kyoto, Japan, for the past several years.

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