Reminiscences: The Reporter- Part 2: 1949

X

X

In this previous post I wrote of how a small collection of the long-defunct magazine The Reporter had come into my possession. I said that I would soon be posting more about it, and I have yet to do so. This has been nagging at me and preventing me from concentrating on other interests. If there is one thing I hate, it’s people who say they are going to do something and then fail to do it. I say this knowing full-well that there is nobody out there tapping his foot while he impatiently waits for my next post on The Reporter. That doesn't help.

It is also true that I don’t feel much like writing about The Reporter right now. My heart isn’t in it. I’m currently into poetry and sick of politics. Looking through these old magazines, heavily weighted with Cold War, Red Scare, and pre-Civil Rights politics as they are, does not much appeal to me. But, do it I must, since I have said that I would.

The cover story of the earliest issue of the magazine in the collection is presented by a cartoonist’s depiction of the Alger Hiss trial. The listing of the article in the table of contents goes like this: The Case of Alger Hiss: Perjury and the defendant have little to do with it; to the public the ghosts of the New Deal are on trial. Hmm. Plus ça change, eh?

The issue is from 1949, the first year of the magazine’s publication. This is not, however, the premiere issue; it is Volume 1, No. 10. In featuring graphic cover art with topical themes, rather than photographs, the magazine is reminiscent of The New Yorker. It also reminds me of another defunct periodical to which I was once a subscriber: the Saturday Review.

The collection of the magazine that I've acquired is not comprehensive. It includes only those issues of the mag in which articles—mostly book reviews, I think—by the scholar and critic, Sidney Alexander, appear. The one in this issue is “G.I.’s and Giottos”—an article about the “four hundred American veterans studying in Italy under the G.I. Bill,” fifty of whom Alexander has discovered to be in Florence.

One interesting paragraph, which seems to be typical of the magazine’s focus, begins with this sentence: “Among the veterans, Negroes form a special group of what I would call American Displaced Persons. Many of them have been here now for more than five years—in suntans and in mufti.” He quotes one Black expatriot: “When am I going home?...Never, I hope. …First time in my life I’ve been treated like a human being. Nobody here cares about the color of my skin. I’m married to an Italian girl. In Italy we can live anywhere we want if we have the money. Why should I go back to Jim Crow and colored slums?”

The same issue contains a full article, written by an African American woman: From Where I Stand: A Negro housewife looks back on a good (and bad) life. This article is presented under the heading “Inside America”. The author’s name is Alyce McComb. It is a reminiscence of growing up Black in the north: “While growing up, we kids learned to work with what we had, in the virtual paradise back of the railway yards in Chicago where God had seen fit to place us. In those days two dollars a day supported a family of five in pretty good style.” It would seem that The Reporter strived to be fair and balanced.

There is an article about Adlai Stevenson’s first year as governor of Illinois. Another is entitled, A Vote for Academic Freedom: A college president says that in choosing teachers the universities can and should govern themselves. One of the conspicuously Cold War-oriented pieces is, Tito is Not for Sale: Yugoslavia’s Communist-in-Chief, who would not bow to Stalin, will not be easy for the West to handle. There is also an article about the great and famous cellist, Pablo Casals, who at that time was conducting a boycott: “Please state very clearly,” said Pablo Casals, “that I love the Americans and I love the British. I once had faith in their governments, but I have been deceived. It would not be dignified to go to those countries and earn money under such circumstances.” ...“I merely cannot accept the fact that the American and British governments have relations with such a man as Franco. It is not dignified.”

You gotta love those artists (and hate those poltiticians.)

There: I’ve done my duty. I’ll close with one of this issue's Cold War cartoons:

I forgot to mention that the "A-Bomb" was also an obsession in those years, and for long after.

X

Quote du Jour: Gutting a Sacred Cow

X
"The Romantic theory assumes that literature is mainly or even purely an emotional experience, that man is naturally good, that man's impulses are trustworthy, that the rational faculty is unreliable to the point of being dangerous or possibly evil. The Romantic theory of human nature teaches that if man will rely upon his impulses, he will achieve the good life. When this notion is combined, as it frequently is, with a pantheistic philosophy or religion, it commonly teaches that through surrender to impulse man will not only achieve the good life but will achieve also a kind of mystical union with the Divinity: this, for example, is the doctrine of Emerson." ~ Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason.

This guy certainly has my number...
X

Quote(s) du Jour: some Proust

X
In tipping my hat to both the artistic (painterly) sensibilities of Marcel Proust himself, and to the mastery of his translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, I offer first the steeple of Saint-Hilaire through the young eyes of the narrator,

And on one of the longest walks we ever took from Combray there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly on to an immense plain, closed at the horizon by strips of forest over which rose and stood alone the fine point of Saint-Hilaire’s steeple, but so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a landscape, to so pure a piece of ‘nature,’ this little sign of art, this single indication of human existence.

and then through the venerable eyes of his grandmother:

“My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play.” And when she gazed on it, when her eyes followed the gentle tension, the fervent inclination of its stony slopes which drew together as they rose, like hands joined in prayer, she would absorb herself so utterly in the outpouring of the spire that her gaze seemed to leap upwards with it; her lips at the same time curving in a friendly smile for the worn old stones of which the setting sun now illumined no more than the topmost pinnacles, which, at the point where they entered that zone of sunlight and were softened and sweetened by it, seemed to have mounted suddenly far higher, to have become truly remote, like a song whose singer breaks into falsetto, an octave above the accompanying air.

Gorgeous. Somehow, it seems that one obtains such perspectives only in Europe.

X

Remembrances: Root-root-root for the home team

X
Now that baseball season is well under way, a nostalgic Rodak remembers the good old days back in Michigan, when Jim Bunning was one of the Good Guys.

As this picture makes crystal clear, Bunning was real nasty in his playing days, coming at you from the right. That much hasn't changed. But, today the senile old fart is throwing the wrong kind of heat.

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, already. Sheeesh!

_______________

That picture of Bunning, btw, did not come from Google Images, but from a cache of similar pix, clipped by yours truly from sports mags in the late '50s and early '60s and kept all these years. I have dozens and dozens of them and will share others throughout the baseball season this year.

X

Remembrances: The Reporter – Part 1: The Archives

X

X
Space is always the issue in an archives; specifically, shelf-space. Even though from this time forward much that is archived for posterity will be preserved digitally, boxes of paper records will continue to be carted into the archives of the world for decades to come. A Distinguished Professor retires, or dies with his tweeds on, and it is as though a cosmic lever were flipped and a trapdoor thrown open. A huge mass of paper, crammed more or less randomly into manila folders, themselves crammed more or less randomly into cardboard boxes—all of it indifferently labeled—is funneled into the archives with a great WHOOSH.

When the dust has settled, it is necessary for somebody to put it all into indexed order, for use down time’s weary road by the archives’ only patron: the Researcher of the Future.

In point of fact, it is often decades before an accessioned collection receives even preliminary attention. To “accession” a set of records is to take possession of those records; to sign on for their care and feeding for the duration. It is, in a sense, not unlike adopting a child. But there is a dark side to archiving that is not available to the foster parent—deaccession. (Well, it wasn’t available until that woman in Tennessee sent that kid back to Mother Russia alone with a note pinned to his shirt.)

But I digress. Cue the shark music from Jaws and let’s get on with it:

Deaccessioning is a matter as dire as defenestration. It is a matter more grave to be deaccessioned than it is to be defrocked. For the deaccessioned all is finito; the merely defrocked will live to grope again. To be deaccessioned is to be torn from the security of the only shelf you can remember, from the snug and cozy eyrie where you spent many months and years, safe and sound in your warm, dry box. It is to be tossed with extreme prejudice into time’s oubliette. It is to find yourself suddenly stacked with mere trash on a damp, dark loading dock, awaiting the arrival of the Grim Shredder’s recycling truck. It is the end of the road.

Only once in a blue moon does a set of deaccessioned materials fall into the hands of a compulsive human pack rat before the worst has happened. This is one such story.

It’s not a long one, but I will make it even shorter. A set of approximately 35 issues of the magazine The Reporter, marked for deaccession, came to my attention. And I snatched them up and gave them a new home. The earliest one is dated August 30, 1949. The last one in the collection is dated December 15, 1966. The magazine covers current events--both political and cultural--during a period of history in which I was a toddler, child, and adolescent. There is much that I can learn from perusing the pages of this cache of liberal journalism from the past. It is my intention to share, from time to time, some of the insights thus gleaned here at Rodak Riffs.

X

Readings: Proust

X

I am now forty pages into the first section of Swann's Way, and determined, after a lifetime of failed attempts, to finally read the whole thing.

X

Rants: An Irony

The irony is that certain comments of mine have recently been characterized as “bigoted” by a Catholic.

Objective observers will have noted that the context provided for the word “Protestant” by Catholic priests (and committed laymen) will most frequently cause it to resonate like the epithet “Nigra,” as spewed from the Mail Pouch-stained lips of a Mississippi deputy sheriff, circa 1960.

“Who is my mother? and who are my brothers?”
X