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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

Articles

The Alienation of Post-Industrial Man

The New Style in British Rebels and Their Films

Canada's Most Valuable Export

Organized Crime and American Society

Congressmen and Social Scientists: The Communication Gap

Albert R. Parsons: An American Architect of Syndicalism

Verse

Chimpanzees Like Men (Aside to Baroness Goodall)

Inventory

A Poem Written at Harper Bend

I Observe Not Poets Singing

Christmas Song

Return

a nun in the classroom

notice

Madame de Pompadour's Room

Arctic Year

Man

Winter Night

Abstract

in this issue. . .

A RECENT SUBSCRIBER, forgetting or perhaps overlooking our regional main title, made his check payable to "A Journal of Contemporary Thought." Now we take serious pride in belonging to the Midwest; we celebrate its artists and writers, seek out articles of particular relevance to our broad region, and think of ourselves as speaking in a midwestern accent. But our subscriber reminds us, though inadvertently, that we strive with equal seriousness to live up to the claim embodied in our second title. We are acutely concerned with our own troubled times, nor can we always repress the uneasy feeling that we have reached some great dividing point in human history and, like travelers in a thick mist, may have poised our foot, not upon the margin of a long and easy green slope, but on the edge of some unthinkable abyss. It is difficult to retain a modest hopefulness in times like these-an age of war, riot, rebellion; of nation arrayed against nation, color against color, the younger against the elder; of blind fanaticism, intemperance, and, all too often, plain mindless indecency, some of the rebel young (and the not-so-young) venting their criticism of their elders in ways reminiscent of the Yahoos "criticizing" Gulliver.

AMONG OUR WRITERS is a man who has not lost his optimism. Although he is fully aware of the gulf between the generations and in fact considers the difference profounder than ever before, HENRY WINTHROP finds a qualitative difference in "post-industrial man" which augurs a new and more hopeful society. Professor Winthrop received his B. S. degree from the College of the City of New York, his M.A. from George Washington University, and his Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research; he has also pursued graduate study at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, American University, and the Graduate School of the Department of Agriculture. He is the author of numerous learned articles, in English and other languages, as well as of governmental studies. A forthcoming book, Ventures in Social Interpretation, is concerned with the impact of science and technology on society. Past and present member of some twenty-one learned societies, he has been a practicing psychologist, an economist and administrator with the Federal government, and director and lecturer at the Muhlenberg Adult Education Forum in New York City. At present he is a professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences of the University of South Florida.

THE BRITISH YOUNG “ANGRIES” of the past two decades offer a special case of the revolt of the younger generation complicated by class hostilities. ALAN CASTY examines the course of this rebellion as depicted in British films. Mr. Casty teaches English at Santa Monica City College, film history and aesthetics at the University of California at Los Angeles, and has published articles on the film and drama in Antioch Review, Film Quarterly, and numerous other periodicals. His book on the American Director Robert Rossen is being published in France this winter and will be brought out by the Museum of Modern Art in this country next spring. Still another book, Mass Media and Mass Man, will be published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston this coming April.

OF GROWING CONCERN to our neighbor Canada as well as to developed and developing countries overseas is the so-called “brain-drain,” the loss of trained and talented manpower drawn into the vortex of the huge space-military-industrial technology of the United States. Preoccupied with our gigantic tasks, we may give this problem little thought until we pick up a Canadian or British newspaper, where the subject is incessantly and anxiously canvassed, or until we happen to look about us. In a midwestern college of moderate size, not richly dowered with Federal grants, it is possible to make a quick count of two faculty members from India, two others of Chinese origin, a German, a Canadian, a Dutchman. More significantly, the majority of these men appear to have reached our campus within the last half-dozen years. True, the tide sometimes runs the other way, as when one of our faculty members migrated to a Canadian university two years ago. The author of our current study of Canada’s export of brains and skills to the United States, Professor JOHN MANNING, of the department of humanities at Michigan State University, is himself a Canadian by birth and has a special awareness of the problem. This is Professor Manning’s third appearance in our journal. His first contribution was a careful analysis of the Columbia River power project which appeared in our pages in 1962. Two years later we published his excellent discussion of present-day U. S.-Canadian relations.

CURRENT EXCITEMENT over "crime in the streets," Cosa Nostra, and still more vaguely defined ills appears likely to engender another crusade and to raise a certain amount of unhelpful dust until it fritters itself out and subsides again. Before we take off once more in all directions, STUART L. HILLS suggests that we make a sober analysis of the covert relationship between organized crime and the structure and desires of American society. Professor Hills received his B. A. at the College of Wooster and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Indiana University. He has published articles in National Crime Review and Sociological Quarterly. He has taught at Indiana University and Central Michigan University and since 1962 has been Associate Professor and Chairman of the Sociology Department of Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio.

THAT A COMMUNICATIONS GAP exists between social scientists and the congressmen they would like to assist is a proposition ably argued by E. TERRENCE JONES in a brief but trenchant analysis. He suggests ways in which they may be helped to understand each other's special difficulties and points of view. Professor Jones has the B. S. from St. Louis University and the Ph.D. from Georgetown University. He has published in Western Political Quarterly and has co-authored a "Disk-Oriented Cross Tabulation" for the Georgetown Computation Center. His present position is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kansas State University, Manhattan.

OUR FINAL ARTICLE examines the work of a forgotten man, Albert R. Parsons, briefly famous in his own day as one of the seven anarchists condemned to death, and one of the four actually hanged, for the Haymarket bombing in Chicago on May 4, 1886 (apparently in naked reprisal for the seven policemen killed by the bomb, since no person could be proved to have thrown the bomb or to be directly implicated in throwing it). Our author, MICHAEL R. JOHNSON, alludes to the Haymarket tragedy but devotes the major Part of his study to showing the relationship of ideas between Par. son's group and the later French syndicalists. Incidentally, the devotion of Parsons and his associates to the work of Remy David Thoreau may serve to remind us that the latter has once again found disciples among the current generation of anarchistic rebels. Mr. Johnson has the B. A. degree from Aurora College, the M. S. from Northern Illinois University, and is a candidate for the Ph.D. at Northern Illinois. He has published several articles and reviews in Science and Society and is now compiling a history and anthology of the Appeal to Reason with the aid of a grant from the Rabinowitz Foundation. He has taught at Northern Illinois University and at the College of Emporia, Emporia, Kansas, and is currently Chairman of the History Department of the Spartanburg Day School, Spartanburg, South Carolina.

THE TEN POETS represented by the dozen poems of our current issue are, with three exceptions, old friends and familiars of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY. A teacher of biology at Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, BRANLEY BRANSON is making his third appearance in our pages. He writes that several of his poems have appeared in The American Bard, the Kansas City Star, the anthology Poets of the Midwest, and elsewhere. . . R. D. LAKIN of Fort Collins, Colorado, has published a number of articles beginning with the first volume of the QUARTERLY but made his belated poetic debut in our literary issue of last summer. . . . ROSE MENENDIAN continues the series of fine poems that began in our October 1966 issue. . . . WILLIAM SALLAR, whose poems have appeared in two earlier issues, writes that he is now teaching at the City College of New York and has published poetry in numerous quarterlies and reviews. . . . Poems by HOLLIS SUMMERS, Athens, Ohio, have appeared in earlier numbers, most recently in the issue of last April. . . . ALBERTA TURNER writes from Oberlin that she is still Director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and still teaching_ creative writing there, as well as. composition and a good many other things at Oberlin College. Last summer she was busy co-editing Milton's familiar letters for the Yale Prose edition, and not surprisingly she adds that poetry has been getting short shrift. . . . DON WELCH of Kearney State College, Kearney, Nebraska, has recently published some lyrics in the Prairie Schooner.

OUR THREE NEWCOMERS are JAMES C. BALOIAN of Fresno, California, KINLEY E. ROBY of State College, Pennsylvania, and GARY SANGE of Washington, D. C. A graduate of Fresno State College, James Baloian is now attending the University of California at Irvine and working on his M. F. A. degree. His poems have appeared in Ararat and in Backwash, the literary magazine of his alma mater. . . . Kinley Roby, a Down-easter by birth and raising and a graduate of the University of Maine, is now engaged in graduate study at Pennsylvania State University. Our third new poet, Gary Sange, was born in California and earned his B. A. and M. A. at San Francisco State College, but for the past four years he has been working on a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa and has now completed his trek eastward by joining the English faculty of Georgetown University. His poetry has appeared in the New York Times, South and West, the Southern Poetry Review, and a number of other journals.

REVIEWS in this issue are the work of three colleagues: DUDLEY T. CORNISH, former editor of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY and present Chairman of the Department of History; MARTIN C. CAMPION, also of the Department of History; and JENNINGS BLACKMON, the present editor’s colleague in the Department of English.

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