magazine troubles, yes, but where's the story?

Yesterday's Times ran a story on the Arts page - something of a lead story - that struck me as oddly reported and unfinished, and it bothered me quite a bit that they'd even run it. Where was the story? At the University of Virginia, the venerable and, until recently, rather sleepy old quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, is having some problems. Its editor, whom almost everyone praises for having revived the journal, seems to be a bad manager and supervisor. There have been complaints to the university from the staff. The editor was turned town for a faculty appointment in the English department. The managing editor, who had suffered from depression, recently committed suicide. The article implies a cause-and-effect connection between and among these factors but--unless we're not being told some crucial fact--it just doesn't add up. Bad relations between a university-affiliated journal and the English department? No news there. A talented editor is bad at running his office? University staff complain about poor management? No news there either. A person suffering from depression takes his own life? Sadly, no news there. So where's the story? I missed any sort of narrative smoking gun here. Presented with this story, as written, the Times editors should have killed the article or asked that the evidence of something newsworthy be made clear. Otherwise, it's commonplace innuendo. As an attentive reader I kept thinking this: Is there something else I need to know to understand this? Is the Times being tasteful in leaving out something salacious? At its worst, the story vaguely implies that the editor drove his managing editor to suicide. But no one quoted in the article comes even close to saying that, so running a fairly major article implying it is, I think, reprehensible as journalism.

(Full disclosure: I got my PhD from UVa; I slightly knew VQR's old longtime editor, Staige Blackford, and wrote perhaps one short review for the journal 25 years ago.)

the seminar (audio)

Here is an audio version of my little essay on the seminar.

manifesto: planning to stay

This talk was presented in response to a request for a manifesto to conclude a four-day conference on new writing practices. The conference took place in February 2010 at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta.

My dicta are four in total. In sum they are:

1) Writing isn’t the only thing that is changing or needs to change. 2) The other kinds of changes might demand an attention very different in kind from our usual. 3) Deep down, most of us do not really want these other changes to come. 4) The ideal site might be where things happen rather than get presented or taught.

Now I will elaborate a little on each:

1) If all this talk about true modal changes caused by (or aided by) writing in new media is going to be more than just talk, then we must also seek, or at least encourage, major changes in the institutions that were and are organized to assure the continuation of the old mode. Which is to say: if publishers and universities and art centers as organizations (with budgets, staff hierarchies, physical spaces, customs of credentialing) are set up assuming these binarisms:

I write/you read
I talk/you listen
I have/you want
I am/you aren’t yet
I have language/you need my language
I produce/you consume & purchase

--and if the relationship I write/you read is in the process of really changing (and indeed most of us here do our work on the assumption that it has already changed)--then all other aspects of the relationship must also be subject to that change. We cannot expect the traditional I write/you read binarism to disintegrate and then just hope that everything else in the writer/reader (and publisher/consumer, teacher/learner) relationship will similarly wither away, for there are actual forces maintaining it.

2) So the most obvious thing one can say is that the conversations we have been having this weekend are not just about writing. We should think every bit as innovatively about the institutions and organizations that rose up around the technology of the book as we have in conceiving the writing that goes on inside or near or astride these institutions. (Complete separation from them is a nice dream, but only as nice and dreamy as other separatisms.)

3) The honest truth is that most of us associated with such organizations - again I mostly mean universities and publishers and art centers, but also humanities institutes and foundations supporting artists – probably don't want the rest of the changes to follow from the disintegration of I write/you read exclusivity. This is especially true of I talk/you listen. (I make noise and you listen silently. I am producing something; you for the moment are unproductive.) Like the poetry reading, the lecture--being an ideology as well as an artifact of a certain phase of technology--is not something most people here are ready to give up. But I'm certain we will all be better off when we’ve put an end to the lecture; and anyway an alternative mode is among the main implications of what we do. So what is truly interactive? How many of us have been promised that such-and-such a gathering would be “interactive” only to find out that what people really want to give--but rarely to receive--is a series of monologues?

4) I do not believe what I'm saying is to come about virtually. It is very much a matter of physical design, of planning (and, incidentally, of planning to stay), of working with brick and mortar. We need to build spaces that are unconducive to what I'm doing right now.

Back in the mid-1970s, when he was promoting “oral poetry” as an alternative to the traditional presentation of writing, Jerome Rothenberg said the following: "As for poetry 'belonging' in the classroom, it's like the way they taught us sex in those old hygiene classes: not performance but semiotics. If I had taken Hygiene 71 seriously, I would have become a monk; & if I had taken college English seriously, I would have been an accountant." Yet Rothenberg did teach poetry in the classroom, and so admitted to a realization I very much admire and have myself used as a guiding principle: “the classroom [can] become a substitute for those places (coffee shop or kiva) where poetry actually happens & where it can be ‘learned’ (not ‘taught’) in action.”

As pre-digital as the metaphor of the kiva is, I still like it. I like it because it pushes the distinction between teaching and learning, and because it imagines spaces where “poetry actually happens” rather than where it is presented as if it’s not there and thus must be talked about.

5-page paper on Stevens, yours for just $59.75

As I sat down to compose this note I proimised myself I wouldn't get worked up. Today during some somewhat relevant googling I happened up one of those Term Paper Mill sites. You know the ones. You've been assigned to write about Mercutio's relationship to Romeo and you find on the web that this company will sell you a 5-page paper on said topic. Everyone in academe (on one side of the paper-assigning divide or the other) has pondered this, at least briefly. I always assumed that if one of my students bought a ready-made paper from such an enterprise, I would notice it immediately--either because of the odd and invariably somewhat off-the-point presentation of the argument or because it would be badly argued and poorly written too.

But the price. Here's the kicker. Today, looking for a quick e-text of Stevens's poem "Mozart, 1935" (readers of this blog will know that I am somewhat obsessed with this poem)--I was too lazy at the moment to walk to the shelf for my copy of the book--I found a 5-page paper "interpreting" this poem. The cost: $59.75. I was so chagrined that I was very tempted to buy a copy and then...what?....expose? rail against? these people. What's more, the little summary reading of the poem remarkably resembles my own reading of it (in a book and at least two articles, the latter available online). Is it possible that I would have been buying a hack-job remix of my own article on the poem? (Click on the image above and left for a larger view.)

I think I would have asked for reimbursement from my university-sponsored research fund for this expense. After all, it would have been research. No?

How desperate would a student have to be to use one of these sites?

As Stevens says, "Play the present."

you are free except to be restricted

In 1949, Raymond B. Allen (pictured at left), then president of the University of Washington at Seattle, published an article titled "Communists Should Not Teach in American Colleges." (It appeared in a magazine called Educational Forum in May of that year.)

Allen did not mean that people actively involved in plots to overthrow the American government by violence should be banned from teaching at American colleges and universities. He would have meant it had that been an issue, but it wasn't. No, he meant those whose beliefs are determined (by him or by a panel of administrator and faculty) to be communist should be pulled from the classroom. Since bona fide members of the CPUSA in those Cold War days were not typically open about their membership, this wasn't simply a matter of ascertaining membership. Real communists might not even be formal members. So beliefs (what they did, what they said, whom they met with) could be used to determine such status.

Anyway, surely the most interesting sentence in this essay is this one:

The University's insistence upon academic freedom goes beyond the traditionally held concept that academic freedom can be abridged only by the institution and asserts that members of the faculty must likewise be free from other restraints that may restrict their freedom.

It means that faculty are free in the usual way that academic freedom guarantees but, at the same time, that faculty must be free from "other restraints." Must be. Those other restraints are ideologies that tend to make one unfree in one's thinking. So, having academic freedom, you are not free to engage in a way of thinking that limits your thinking. Of course this was a vague way of referring to communist ideology. A faculty member, Allen thought, could proceed intellectually and pedagogically under any set of principles or ideas, even those--let's say one's Catholicism even if one is a biologist exploring conception--that otherwise limit one's exploration of research topics...any set of principles except this one (communism).

In other words, academic freedom is the granting of freedom but it is also a demand that one must be free from an unfree worldview determined by the university to be such.

My position that Communists are not qualified to be teachers, Allen also wrote, grows out of my belief that freedom has little meaning apart from the integrity of the men and women who enjoy that freedom....The Communist Party, with its concealed aims and objectives, with its clandestine methods and techniques, with its consistent failure to put its full face forward, is a serious reflection upon the integrity of educational institutions that employ its members and upon a whole educational system that has failed to take the Communist issue seriously.... The classroom has been called "the chapel of democracy." As the priests of the temple of education, members of the teaching profession have a sacred duty to remove from their ranks the false and robot prophets of Communism....

Here's to whole article from '49.

The photograph of Allen above at left was printed in the Washington Post on March 27, 1949.

on love & reading

I started teaching at the university level in '79 - that's 30 years ago. In that time I've received thousands of student evaluations through the institutional bubble forms. Sometimes the response I can discern from the forms helps me to make a course better the next time. Sometimes I can merely enjoy the positives. Sometimes I glance quickly and move on. I'm a huge supporter of students' response (I try to make it part of the course itself, to be sure--but that's another story) but not a fan of the bubble forms. Anyway, I got one recently for the fall '08 version of my modern & contemporary American poetry course (my favorite of those I teach), English 88, that positively stunned me. I like it. The comment says merely: "LOVE" (underscored three times) and to the right of that: "this class taught me how to read." Not literally, of course, but "to read" as in: really, really to read thoughtfully, well, freshly. Makes me happy and proud. That someone would associate love with learning truly to read and a college course. These are not normally three peas in the same pod.

create community post-MFA

Poets & Writers, quite pre-professional, nonetheless fairly often admits or implies that young writers who get MFAs might want or need to do things other than join the academy, where "Creative Writing" programs as such are often if not mostly deemed fringe zones of mere practice. Anyway, I was pleased to see that the magazine's latest stab at alternative options includes advice for young writers to "Help out a literary organization," and mentions the Kelly Writers House as one such site. Below is the relevant passage (click on the image for a larger view). And click here for the whole article.

the odious machine

Ron Silliman, who knew Mario Savio fairly well in Berkeley, tells me that Savio did not seek out his leadership role in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement - that he was shy; that he would rather, finally, have been studying his Philosophy. Anyway, his FSM work certainly distorted his life. He had a history of heart trouble and (since this blog is not official biography, nor history, etc.) let's just speculate that the heroic role and its aftermath shortened his life as well. He died at 53 in 1996.

In my own top ten list of great speeches, somewhere up around 5th is Savio's brilliant, stirring, apparently improvised speech on Dec. 2, 1964, spoken from Sproul Plaza in front of Berkeley's main administration building. I have always been stunned by the aptness of his analogy between the big research university (the way it used to treat its undergrads--and to some degree still does) and the factory machine.

I admired this because Savio is turning around the metaphor Berkeley chancellor Clark Kerr already used to describe postwar higher education: it was, said Kerr proudly and patriotically, a "knowledge factory."

I admired the speech even more when I learned that Savio's father was a machine punch operator.

"There is a time," he said, "when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

In my 1950s site, I've reproduced the New York Times obituary.

open-book prof

In today's NYT "ThursdayStyles" section the lead story, under a huge photo of a famous crusty TV law prof, is a story about "the professor as open book." Wow! News! Now students and others can discover their professors' red wine preferences, their favorite films, their social-networking profiles, "friend" them. Or not - or not - if the academic in question does not choose to put such stuff up, which is most often the case, even at this late date into the internet age. So what really is the story here? The key perhaps is where the story runs: the "Style" section, not the higher-ed page/half-page in the main first section. This story befits the My Space/You Tube/no-one-is-private-anymore craze and has nothing to do with academics or education or the professoriat per se.

"It is not necessary for a student studying multivariable calculus, medieval literature or Roman archaeology to know that the professor on the podium shoots pool, has donned a bunny costume or can’t get enough of Chaka Khan.

Yet professors of all ranks and disciplines are revealing such information on public, national platforms: blogs, Web pages, social networking sites, even campus television....

While many professors have rushed to meet the age of social networking, there are some who think it is symptomatic of an unfortunate trend, that a professor’s job today is not just to impart knowledge, but to be an entertainer."

Now ponder this last part. The professor's "job" seemed to be in part to create an aura of personal impenetrability and solitariness and remoteness only when, as it happens, the technologies of personal knowing were what they were. Now that they are what they are, the "job" seems to be changing. These things are not innate. And as for entertainment, it's the Times that's asserting this by putting the "story" on its Style page. There's nothing more or less entertaining about a teacher who is known as distinct from unknown. It all depends on the teaching.

Buckley caught red-handed

I'm one of those people who've actually read William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale. Mind you, I'm not recommending it - just, perhaps, asserting my oddity or mania or both. It's a very poorly argued book but, as you might expect from a young Buckley, dazzling in its audacity. I've always enjoyed the replies, reviews and counterarguments published all over the place in the months after the book made its first splash. McGeorge Bundy's reply appeared in the December 1951 Atlantic:

"When I sat down to review Mr. Buckley's book, I was somewhat concerned lest my readers refuse to believe that so violent, unbalanced, and twisted a young man really existed. His rejoinder removes that concern, and it remains to demonstrate that as a defense it is almost a complete fraud."

That's hilarious. Of course "that concern" refers to the fact that such a person as the young Buckley actually existed!

Then of course the attack on Yale by one of its recent own created defenses of the university - I mean Yale, but also the idea of the modern university - that were, well, purely defensive, and also theoretically untenable. I'm now looking at a New York Times column reprinting the entirety of a report issued by an advisory committee of Trustees and other alumni, a "Report on Intellectual Policy." The gist is that "the business of a university is to educate, not to indoctrinate, its students." This was a distinction they had to make. This was 1952 - February 18 to be exact - and HUAC'ism and McCarthyism and McCarranism dominated the landscape; these old Yalies had to insist that there were no communists on the faculty, and to do so they mostly didn't mention communism but tried to imply it by describing the utter neutrality and apoliticism of the points of view of the faculty. Thus education shares nothing with indoctrination, and students at Yale "study, discuss, and write about facts and ideas without restrictions, other than those imposed by conscience and morality." That's a huge logical "other than those..." turn. Constraints following the mores of the day - and those established by the tradition of the university - do not hedge free discussion, qualify the student-written word, or create boundaries between what can and cannot be studied in association with a class. God and Man at Yale ironically did nothing to make this back-and-forth freedom-constraint discussion a significant one, and when Yale entered the 1960s, and students began to demand real freedom to discuss, write and resist curricular indoctrination, it was as if the big Buckley fracas had never taken place.

Buckley and Bozell, in their defense of Joseph McCarthy (McCarthy and his Enemies) wrote: "A hard and indelible fact of freedom is that a conformity of sorts is always dominant... [Therefore] the freeman's principal concern is that it shall be a conformity that honors the values he esteems rather than those he rejects" (p. 120). The above-cited book - and Buckley's ridiculous Yale book - are both full of hateful contentions and loose empty logic, but I have to say that here the Far Right is being franker about conformity than the Academic Center. A conformity that honors the values the conformed person esteems. That's surely it.

Now that Buckley is gone, mainstream media talking heads are describing his charm and even his talent for ideological crossing. And folks not just on the political right are coming forward to say that they were his friends and that they felt his grace and generosity. I don't really believe any of this, although I do recommend that you leave this zone of the web and go over to YouTube to watch some clips from Firing Line. The debate between Buckley and Noam Chomsky on Vietnam in '69 is stunningly good. I also have to say that I was momentarily moved by David Brooks' recollection of Buckley's generosity this past week during the Brooks-Shields political round-up on The NewsHour. (Brooks as a U Chicago upstart had brutally satirized WFB's limo- and ski trip-centered lifestyle, whereupon Buckley, giving a speech at Chicago, asked if there was a David Brooks in the audience. There was, and Buckley hired him on the spot. Call it strategic cooptation of the Young Right; call it reaching out. Either way, Brooks's gratitude is real.)

My own vision of being caught with Buckley alone has always been that of the oblivious mouse at the end of a cave with a venomous snake. (Psychoanalyze that if you like.)

Now I hold in my hands (as Tailgunner Joe used to say) an unpublished letter dated December 15, 1953, which I read and had photocopied in the Henry Regnery Papers at the Hoover Institution. It's in the Buckley file of Regnery's correspondence in box 10 of the enormous Regnery collection there. Regnery was a conservative publisher of conservative books. He worked with the liberal president of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, on several Great Books projects, but for the most part he published far right essayists, novelist, literary critics (at least one book on Pound), and poets (Roy Campbell, e.g.) who were having a hard time finding a press. At this early point in Buckley's career, Regnery was a crucial supporter. The problem with McCarthy and His Enemies was that it was a big and expensive book - $6.50. At that price it would not sell. Buckley and Regnery agreed that if "gifts" (donations) could be made toward the selling of 6,000 advance copies of the book, Regnery could dare to print a larger first run, and the press could lower the price to $5.

So back to this 1953 letter. It's from William F. Buckley to The Honorable Joseph R. McCarthy himself. Buckley says he's thrilled that McCarthy likes the book so much (which he has no doubt seen in galleys). It "justifies the faith that your most earnest friends have in you." So "let me at this point ask your help," and Buckley goes on to ask if McCarthy can arrange for donations to be made to - in effect - subvene the cost of publishing the book. Buckley wonders if McCarthy can arrange with foundations to "accept gifts which would be earmarked for buying these advance copies." This was McCarthy at his height, or perhaps a few months after he'd reached the zenith of his power and influence. I don't know enough about the publication of Buckley's pro-McCarthy book to know if McCarthy did arrange for such "gifts," but I find the letter utterly remarkable. Leave aside that it's untoward for the supposedly independently minded author of a book to ask the book's controversial subject to help pay for its publication. I'm sure this sort of thing happens all the time. But here's the same brilliant, young, already famously autarchic fellow asking an elected government official to use his influence to engineer donations to ensure the profitability of a right-wing publisher. Surely this was deemed (even in those urgent days) to be a huge no-no, and surely WFB knew it.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'm naive about such things. (Maybe? Almost certainly.)

Near the end of this letter, the late great William F. Buckley says to the Honorable Joseph R. McCarthy: "Any suggestions you might have will be exploited with McCarthy-like vigor."

What a clever man he was.

Related: why real conservatives hate Freud.

60-second lecture on the end of the lecture

Here is my one-minute lecture on the end of the lecture. I gave it on a spring day in 1999. (Thanks, belatedly, to Val Ross for inviting me to participate the "60-Second Lecture Series" she created.)

I've written here several times - perhaps several times too many - on this topic. Here's an instance. And here's another.

apprenticeship, mentorship, internship

There's a nice article about the Kelly Writers House in today's New York Times by Alan Finder, the reporter who covers higher education for the paper. This link should work (it might not if you don't have a subscription): LINK. In the paper itself, the story seems to be in section B, page 7 (at least in the edition I get delivered to my house here in Philly).

So what is the point? “Apprenticeship, mentorship, internship,” Dr. Filreis said. The goal, he added, “is to enrich the undergraduates’ lives outside the classroom.”

“For me, this is Swarthmore, Reed or Bard, here in the middle of a big research university,” said Dr. Filreis, a bearded, often beaming professor of modern and contemporary poetry whose enthusiasm and avuncular demeanor seem to permeate the Writers House. “This is a little bit of Bard. You can come in and people know who you are.”

MORE>>>

where are you now, Bill Ringler?

In the The Chronicle of Higher Education for November 9, there's an article about young academics who feel like frauds. Here's the link to John Gravois's piece. When this phenomenon was seriously studied, it was found that about 70 percent of people from all walks of life — men and women — have felt like impostors for at least some part of their careers.

There's even a web site for the syndrome.

I really don't like being grumpy about human psychology, but it occurs to me first that some of these young academics are (merely) feeling panic about not having as much knowledge about their fields of expertise as they feel they need to have. In other words, they are imposters, in a sense. Or: they're in a profession where one doesn't really know enough until one has been thinking, teaching, writing and studying for a decade or more. Or: one will never know enough. (And yet they must publish, so almost by definition what they write will be based on significantly incomplete knowledge. It all makes sense. In fact, too much sense.)

Years ago I met Bill Ringler. William A. Ringler, Jr. I was a young scholar feeling rather imposterish, research modern poetry in the manuscript archive of the Huntington Library. I and about thirty other scholars did nothing each day but go to the oasis-like Huntington in San Marino, California, enter the quiet, air-conditioned archives room, read rare books and manuscripts. I was rushing to get out my "tenure book." The Huntington did then, and proabably still does, have a noontime ritual. The manuscripts room closes down entirely for an hour. Everyone has to leave. The idea was to encourage the scholars to walk together across the botanical gardens to a little cafe just past the Shakespeare garden. This is all before the public was permitted to enter the gardens at 1 PM, so we had the place utterly to ourselves. So we did this: we walked to the cafe, where I had lunch at tables with scholars of Renaissance literature, California railroad historians, people examining the 1,200 negatives made by the woman photographer Frances B. Johnston, etc.

Once I met Bill Ringler, then more than 80 years old, I always made a dash to Bill's table. Bill was the world's foremost bibliographer-scholar of 16th-century English lyrics. By the time I met him he knew most of them by heart. Really. He had not been a hugely productive scholar--in, I mean, terms of the number of books and articles he'd published. But everyone knew that he knew more about his subject than anyone else. People used to come to the Huntington to be near Bill--never mind the rare books. He was a rare book.

He had taught at the University of Chicago for decades, and now he "retired to the Huntington." Lived in Pasadena or somewhere and walked to the library every day and studied. Preparing himself to compile the once-in-a-generation tome.

I once asked him, in effect, why he had taken so long to put this book together. It seemed that he'd been the expert in 16th-century English lyric for at least several decades already. His answer was "I don't know enough about it yet, but I will soon." And then: "Some of these things take thirty or forty years to master. If you have that kind of time, then taking that long is appropriate to the task. The best scholars are sometimes people in their 80s."

I'm not of course recommending that any of these nervous young academics wait decades before feeling they know their subject matter well enough to feel they can write definitively about it. I'm just reacting to the sad but also obvious or truistic news of the imposter complex. Bill Ringler had one, big time, but it put him at peace, and made him want to get up in the morning at an age when many folks, having been driven by nervousness all their professional lives, now drool and putter around the roses.

Bill puttered around the roses, as did I in those blissful weeks in Research Heaven, but only for that one enforced hour each day. Then: back to the work.

beware those ecdysiasts on campus

Time magazine, December 1947*: in its "Education" section there's a squib (a little more than one column) under the title "Unwelcome Guests," and it begins thus:

"In less dogmatic days, most U.S. colleges were places were all sides of many questions were heard. Student groups sponsored after-hours speeches by Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Buchmanites, Zoroastrians and ecdysiasts. But times have changed. Last week, six colleges barred their doors to speakers who were Communists or fellow travelers." And it goes on to say that one of those barred was novelist Howard Fast (shown above), and we have a photo of Fast set into the piece above the phrase "No one-syllable refusals."

I've read an awful lot of news articles like this from the period 1946 or so through around 1962, so I think I know and can place the rhetoric here.

In 1947 anticommunist rhetoric had not yet set in. In 1952 or '53, the article - if it took this approach at all, if it covered the "barring" of such speakers from campuses at all - would have intensified the mock of all the -isms that are out there. Here it's satirical enough: we go from what were in the 1930s three major voices (right, liberal-left and radical left) to a minor passing sect of radical left (Buchmanites) and then immediately to tiny far-flung minority (Zorastrian) with its tone of a little ridiculous to deliberately obscure (isn't America great that there even exist such voices?!). A classic list assuring diversity: starts serious and ends by mocking this multivocal craziness our forefathers guaranteed. So as I say a few years later we might have gotten such a list, but the earlier period - the 1930s - would not have been described as "less dogmatic days." In Time in '47 we could think of these days as "dogmatic" and those ideologically fraught days (the Red Decade) as "less dogmatic." In 1952 those days would dogmatic and these days, a time in which, alas, it's a necessity to keep communists from speaking at colleges, would be less dogmatic. The terms later were: sane, reasonable, mature, pragmatic, strategic, post-ideological, settled, sane. Did I already say sane?

What's even funnier about all this - and makes me think that the anonymous Time squib-writer was having a nice go at the early anticommunists - is that an ecdysiast is a performer who provides erotic entertainment by undressing to music. Much, much, much more common to colleges campuses (at least behind the closed doors of fraternities) than Zoroastrians or even Communists ever were.

At the end of this little forgotten piece, Eleanor Roosevelt, contacted in Geneva for comment (where she was attending a meeting of the Commission on Human Rights, of all apt things for her to be doing just then), is quoted as saying that Americans "are not completely sure of our ability to make democracy work." It's '47 and Truman hasn't quite made his rightward move away from the Roosevelt legacy, and Eleanor is quoted approvingly approving, in effect, human rights extended to American communist speakers at universities - in short, free speech despite the risks of subversion.

[] Fast bio
[] Fast on the Peeksill riots
[] a short story by Fast
[] a 1959 sci fi story by Fast, a fascinating political allegory

* Dec. 22, 1947, p. 50.