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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

Articles

Economic Service Abroad and the Draft

The Rhetoric of Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail

Some Continuing Thought on Automation

Oxford's Answer

Mark Twain and the Dark Angel

Verse

AAF, Video

At the Dressing Table

In December

Skaters

Aunt Edna

The Tabernacle

Song of the Wind

Gifted Hands

Rules for the Dance

The Robot Band

Fox

The Swamp in Winter

Abstract

in this issue. . .

CROWDING the top of anybody's list of vital questions now facing the United States are automation, civil rights, the draft, the Great Society, taxes, and the war in Vietnam. It is beyond the charter of this journal to offer discussions of every major issue in every issue. Since most manuscripts reaching us are unsolicited, choices are limited somewhat by chance. And there are still contributors who have the mistaken notion that this is primarily a literary magazine, a historical journal, or a scholarly review requiring elaborate footnotes. Fortunately, the very number of manuscripts arriving here in the year just ended has bettered our chances and broadened our choices. The first three articles in the following pages touch the first three questions above, effectively, imaginatively, intelligently. Indeed, all five of the following essays provide, we think, solid internal justification for their publication here.

CONFERENCES, debates, and wide disagreement and dissatisfaction about, over, and with the draft have been fairly constant since passage of the Selective Service Act of 1940. Numerous suggestions for improvement of the situation have been made over the decades, some of the most articulate and stimulating at the Chicago conference last December. Long before that meeting had been convened, however, LAWRENCE R. VELVEL, now assistant professor of law at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, had prepared and submitted his brief in favor of imaginative liberalization of the draft in directions already pioneered by the Peace Corps. Professor Velvel holds an A. B. from the University of Michigan and a J. D. from that university's law school where he was an assistant editor of the law review. Before joining the law faculty at Lawrence, he worked for the Department of Justice and on the staff of a United States Senator.

CONTRASTING sharply with the various backlashes to racial violence in the past six months is the nonviolent philosophy characteristic of the earlier civil rights movement of which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the most articulate spokesman. HAIG A. BOSMAJIAN, assistant professor of speech at the University of Washington, analyses Dr. King's most eloquent statement of his case and cause. Professor Bosmajian has published discussions of Nazi persuasion and propaganda techniques, current protest, and Plato's apology in Discourse, Folklore, The Journal of General Education, The Southern Speech Journal, and Western Speech. Editor of Readings in Speech (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), he is also author of The Rhetoric of the Speaker: Speeches and Criticism which D. C. Heath will publish this spring.

FORECASTING the shape of things to come is fairly common fare for anybody's January issue. There is, however, nothing common in the stimulating and disturbing views of some of the potentialities of automation resulting from collaboration between an anthropologist and a historian. DWIGHT W. HOOVER, associate professor of history at Ball State University, took his A. B. from William Penn College, Iowa, his A. M. from Haverford College, Pennsylvania, and returned to Iowa City for his Ph.D. Before going to Muncie, he taught at Bethune-Cookman College in Florida and at Kansas State University, Manhattan. His articles have appeared or will soon appear in The American Quarterly, The Ball State Forum, The Indiana Social Studies Quarterly, and The Reformed Review. Trained as a historian of ideas, he is currently trying his hand at a manuscript on recent American historiography. The other half of this scholarly partnership, DAVID L. SCRUTON, is professor of anthropology at Ball State. His A. B. is from the University of Oklahoma, Norman, his A. M. from Washington University, St. Louis, and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle. He spent the past year in African studies at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies under a National Science Foundation grant. Author of articles in The Ball State Forum and The Indiana Social Studies Quarterly, he is currently working on the evolution of the nation-state system.

CONSIDERING educational developments in England relevant meat for our table, we welcome back WARREN O. AULT after an absence of two years. Some readers will recall his article, "The British Crisis in Higher Education," in our January, 1965, issue, written against the background of the Robbins Report (1963) which appeared during one of Professor Ault's frequent visits to England. In his current article, he examines the Franks Report, quite literally Oxford's answer to criticisms explicit and implicit in the earlier inquiry. Himself a Rhodes Scholar (from Kansas), Professor Ault's A. B. and A. M. are from Oxford; his Ph.D. is from Yale. He taught history at Baker University before going to Boston University from which he recently retired after a fifty-year tenure. His life-long interest has been the English medieval village community, and continuing research took him to England a dozen times. Publication of his Open-Field Husbandry and the Village Community: A Study of Agrarian By-Laws in Medieval England crowned his efforts in the fall of 1965.

MEDIEVAL England held few charms for the late Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens, 1835-1910), but his writings continue to attract and involve successive generations of scholars of American literature. While his Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, et aliter are vibrant with life, there is a darker side to them and to their author. LARRY R. DENNIS, about fifty years from retirement, is instructor of English in New York University College at Geneseo, thirty miles south of Rochester. His bachelor's degree in general literature and creative writing is from Harpur College, Binghamton, New York; his master of arts is from the University of Washington.

OBVIOUSLY convinced of the correctness of our earlier selections, we offer twelve poems in this issue, nine of them by men and women whose work we have previously published. Of the ten poets contributing to this midwinter selection, only two bear names new to our pages: TED KOOSER of Lincoln, Nebraska, and JAMES TATE of Iowa City, Iowa. The former, underwriter in the medical department of Bankers Life insurance company, is an English graduate of Iowa State University, Ames, who attended the University of Nebraska's graduate college for a year during which he won the Vreeland Award for poetry (1964); his work has appeared in Poet & Critic, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere, and his first collection of poems, "Official Entry Blank," has been tentatively accepted for publication next year. . . . Our own James Tate won his A. B. in English here in 1965 and has since been involved in the Master of Fine Arts program at the State University of Iowa, in part as a teaching assistant in the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop; his poems have been widely published (Atlantic, Choice, Dust, The Manhattan Review, The New Yorker, and The North American Review, inter alia), and his first book, The Lost Pilot, has just appeared in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Besides being represented in two anthologies this year (Heartland and Midland II), he leaves shortly on a reading tour which will bring him back to this campus and take him to a wide variety of other academic groves, from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Andover Academy, and Niagara University in the East to Simon Frazer University in British Columbia, Portland State College in Oregon, and the University of California at Irvine. Between classes and trips, he is at work on a verse play and a second collection of poems.

CONTRIBUTING our other nine poems are JACK BOBBITT who teaches American Literature and advanced writing over at the University of Missouri in Rolla . . . IMOGENE BOLLS, instructor in English at Wittenberg University in Ohio, whose work first appeared in our last October issue . . . VICTOR CONTOSKI of Madison, Wisconsin, translations of whose "Four Modern Polish Poets" appeared in Quixote last fall . . . KENNETH C. GAERTNER of Ann Arbor, Michigan, whose "The Land" we published in our recent autumn issue . . . MARY OLIVER of Provincetown, Massachusetts, who will be represented (with James Tate) in an anthology entitled Heartland: Poets of the Midwest, compiled by Lucien Stryk, and to be published this spring by Northern Illinois University . . . ALBERTA T. TURNER of the Oberlin College English faculty whose "Winter Swallow" we published five long years ago this month . . . JOHN STEVENS WADE of Monmouth, Maine, represented in American Poems and The Crucible Anthology (England) and staff member of a seminar on contemporary American poetry at Wisconsin State University, La Crosse, and of the Cape Cod Writers' Conference last summer . . . And PETER WILD, graduate student in English at the University of Arizona, Tucson, whence he will probably go on to the University of California at Irvine (hopefully in time to catch James Tate); besides two chapbooks scheduled for publication this winter, "Sonnets" and "The Good Fox," he has completed a book-length manuscript of poems, "The Afternoon in Dismay," which is currently going the rounds.

REVIEWS in this issue are the work of our English colleagues down the hall: REBECCA PATTERSON, our poetry editor and house Dickinson specialist, and WALTER SHEAR, whose articles and reviews frequently grace our pages.

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