The Reporter - Part 8: December 29, 1955

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I have once again let a full month and more go by without putting up a new post on the next edition of The Reporter in the collection that I saved from the recycling shredder and brought home from the O.U. library. My enthusiasm for the project continues to flag. I found almost nothing of interest in this issue, including the review by our common thread, Sydney Alexander, of a biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow, it seems was a bore even to the academic intelligentsia of the mid-1950s. Giving his own, rather than the biographer's, insight into the character of Longfellow, Alexander writes:

Certainly [Longfellow] must have been a lovable man... Yet, with all his virtues, his place in American literature must be negatively defined... Too perfectly balanced to vibrate, he fails to set up vibrations in us. "Non clamor, sed amor" was the appropriate motto on his bookplate.

This issue does feature a short story by John Cheever. That was promising, but it turned out to have been Cheever, the prototypical suburban writer, writing a story about a prototypical suburban writer. I hate it when that happens.

We have yet another article about Eisenhower's iffy health. We have two articles speculating on who will become the next leader of France and Germany respectively. I wouldn't have cared then any more than I care now.

There is an article entitled "Battle Royal for Oil: The California Tidelands" about an on-going feud between the municipality of Long Beach and the state of California over the revenues to be gained from off-shore drilling, and how that feud was being manipulated to its own advantage by Big Oil. Sarah Palin might actually have been of some help to these folks in this instance, had she not been born too late.

Anna Magnani is cited as being an up-and-coming young movie actress to watch in a review of "The Rose Tattoo." He got that one right.

As this was the Christmas issue, more or less, a token nod to the season was made both with the cover art and with the editorial on page one. The editorial noted that due to the concerted efforts of various councils of churches to "put Christ back in Christmas" over a six-year period, the percentage of religious Christmas cards had risen from 6 to 25 per cent. Not bad. Let's hear it for the councils of churches. Ready? One-two-three -- Ya-a-a-a-y Councils!

The banner story is an admonition by editorialist, Max Ascoli, to putative Democratic presidential candidate, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. "Your integrity and intelligence have made you state the plain truth that moderation is the key word of our times; and of course you know that a stirring of perhaps immoderate popular conviction is needed to carry you into the White House" Ascoli asserts, ending his piece with this veiled threat:

xxxA striking feature of the recent national elections in western countries is the lack of popular concern with foreign affairs. Why should it be any different, considering how little even nations like Britain and France can contribute to their own survival by influencing the condition of the outside world? It's a wide-spread, terrifying, yet very human let-George-do-it attitude. George is us.

xxxWill you have confidence in George, Governor? Will you prove to him that foreign affairs have first, second, and third priority? Will you show that you are ready not only to talk but to act as a President? If you do it, Governor, you will become one.

In other words, don't you dare let the Cold War die, you over-educated pinhead sissy, even in your dreams!

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The Reporter - Part 7: December 1, 1955

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I see that it has been almost exactly one month since I posted the last in my series of backward glances at The Reporter. Skimming through this one, I’m getting the feeling that this reluctance to get on with the task represented a prescient, if subliminal, message received from somewhere beyond concerning just how little of interest was going to be found in this issue. Maybe it’s me, but I just can’t get into it. I can’t get into it with such complete indifference that I despair of ever, in this life, getting through the entire collection.

Let’s get our boy Sidney Alexander (since the whole thing is his fault) out of the way, right here at the outset. In this issue, Alexander reviews the career of Italian novelist, Alberto Moravia. I have never read anything by Alberto Moravia, and I hereby swear a solemn oath never to be tempted into doing so. Moravia was apparently hot stuff in 1955. But that knowledge in hand, I will go wholeheartedly with Alexander’s closing words: “…a decade after the fall of Fascism, we see that Moravia’s caustic view has nothing to do with politics: His people are still the indifferent ones, staring at the same brick wall.” I stand solidly with them in that indifference.

The cover story, authored by Max Ascoli, and proclaimed by the cover banner “The Hidden America” concerns a symposium of academic intellectuals held at Marquette University in Milwaukee to commemorate its 75th anniversary. My, isn’t that exciting? The article unfolds as an extremely wordy call for these same intellectuals to rally themselves and muster their peers in the service of developing ideas—vital ideas—which will serve to overcome a creeping pessimism which Ascoli sees as threatening the American Way of Global Dominance:

“Mine is a frank plea for respecting both facts and ideas, addressed to fellow intellectuals. We certainly cannot go on much longer…with, on the one hand, hallowed ideas that are getting increasingly stereotyped and uncommunicable, and, on the other, the huge, mountainous accumulation of unorganized tidbits taken from newspaper clippings or statistics or public-relations press releases, and all called facts. Things have gone well beyond the point of national safety.”

OMG! How little did he know about what “national safety” could withstand. He begins his next paragraph with:

“Mine is a plea for ideas, but not for ideologies. We do not need ideological binges in our country, or systematic attempts to force the hand of history for the sake of verifying historical predictions and reaching some perfect, immutable order of things.”

Right. Okay. Ronnie Reagan—you can stay in Hollywood: it’ll be cool, man. Barry Goldwater—run your department store, or whatever: you’re not needed. Newt Gingrich—stay on campus and conduct your own little symposia: be good to your wife. Tea-baggers—you never happened: it was all a dream.

We also have an article here titled “Saudi Arabia: Oil, Sand, and Royalties”. This one, while demonstrating the cosmic power of the phrase plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, deals with the cozy relationship between “King Saud…head of the puritanical Wahabi sect” and Aristotle Socrates Onassis, who has been charged with building up a fleet of tankers to ship Saudi oil. It’s always about oil, isn’t it?

The next article is entitled “Can Mao Collectivize Half a Billion Farmers?” That one’s a historical dead-end, eh? Where would Wal-Mart be today if…

Then we have another article about the arms race and nuclear deterrence -- been there; done that. So, we move on to an article about pre-statehood Hawaii, the final section is headed “Second Thoughts on Statehood”. The closing paragraph is:

“If mainland Democratic opposition continues—presumably on grounds of race prejudice—while Republican enthusiasm from Hawaii cools off, statehood would presumably be farther away than ever. But as far as Hawaii’s latest revolution is concerned, statehood is pretty much a side issue. The Territory’s big problem is whether it can handle its coming of age without destroying the human gentleness and warmth which, along with this matchless climate, have given Hawaii at least some of the qualities of paradise.”

In other words, will the haoles fuck-up the Garden of Eden? Hell, yes, they will. And they’ll lose Obama's birth certificate one day, too.

Do you want to hear about an article concerning Lyndon Johnson as a senator from Texas? No? Then how about a biography of James Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus? (Stanislaus? What kind of name is that for frickin’ mick?)

Fuggedaboutit. In the immortal words of Roberto Duran: No mas!

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The Reporter - Part 6: November 3, 1955

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The banner on the cover of this issue alludes to the fact that in November 1955 the nation stood one year prior to a presidential election. Max Ascoli, the editorialist of the corresponding piece, in noting that “Presidential Campaigns normally start at least one year before the election”, cites Eisenhower’s hinky ticker and the resultant uncertainty regarding Ike’s ability to run for a second term, as contributing to the “alarmingly wide-open” onset of the campaign season. He closes his piece by stating that “At this stage, The Reporter has only moderate interest in candidates.” I hear you, Max.

The cover art, a nice depiction of Egypt’s sun-drenched sphinx, tell us that there is more to-do with the Middle East in this issue. The related article is entitled “Egypt’s Liberation Province, The Beginning of a Beginning”. According to paragraph one, a project “with which the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser is occupied is Liberation Province, a reclamation project on the Libyan desert bordering the delta of the Nile between Cairo and Alexandria.” How’d that deserty, reclamationy thing work out fer ya, Gamal?

The next article, sticking with the Middle East theme, is “Paris: Revolt in the ‘Casbahs’”. It concerns rumbles in the French urban ghettoes housing hoardes of North African immigrants who have recently rioted over a housing shortage combined with a lack of jobs. We are treated to the contemplation of 20th century colonialism in a paroxysm characteristic of its overall death throes. Pretty. And not over yet.

At home, the Red Scare is not over yet, either. Henry Steele Commager gives us an article entitled “The Perilous Delusion of Security”. The gist of the piece can be seen in Commager’s observation that “the security system…has not brought security but insecurity. It has not enhanced administrative or political competence but destroyed it. It has demolished much of governmental operations abroad. It has set department against department within the government”…etc. He concludes: “If we have lost that faith [“in the virtue and integrity of our fellow citizens”], we have lost everything. No program will save us, and we don’t even deserve to be saved.” Glenn Beck, call your office.

Our common thread, Sidney Alexander, disappoints in this issue. He writes a review of the kind of novel in which I have the least possible interest—the family saga—The Tree of Man by Patrick White. Patrick White? Never heard of him. The name sounds like a declarative sentence, as spoken by Chris Rock.

I’ll wrap up my spotty survey of this issue by noting a piece entitled “A Lion in the Garden” by French reporter, Madeleine Chapsal. It concerns a trip made by American novelist, William Faulkner “to Paris on a State Department mission” and his appearance at a cocktail party held in his honor at the powerful French publishing house, Gallimard. It is the tale of a discomfort and futility that not even repeated doses of bourbon could ameliorate: “There is no use looking at Faulkner. You must read him. To someone who has read him, Faulkner has given all that he has, and he knows it. Then one can understand that when he keeps saying ‘I am a farmer,’ or ‘I wrote that book so that I could buy a good horse,’ it is only another way of putting first things first—what Faulkner wants one to be interested in are his books.” That makes perfect sense to me.

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The Reporter - Part 5: October 20, 1955

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The first thing one might notice about this edition of The Reporter is that the cover art has no connection to the banner headline. The small print beneath the headline reads “The Troubles on Israel’s Frontiers", which accounts for the cover art.

"The Turning Point” in the presidency of Dwight David Eisenhower is explained by the opening paragraph of the title editorial by Max Ascoli:

What happened to the President and to the nation on that Saturday, September 24, can perhaps best be defined by the common-law term “act of God,” taken in its most literal religious sense. On that day a Power infinitely beyond our calculations stunned us all by affecting the beat of one man’s heart.

That is to say, Ike had a heart attack. The second paragraph goes on to say:

It turned out to be no more than a gentle warning both to the President and to the people, but it has been enough to convey the notion that while the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower may well run through its full course, it will surely not be continued into a second term.

Well, so much for that article. As we know, Ike not only finished his first term—weak ticker, or not—but he did run again, in 1956, and win. And he finished that term, too.

The following (and related) article, by Sidney Hyman, entitled “The Founding Fathers and Presidential Disability” goes on at great length concerning what should be done if Ike’s heart snapped again, disabling him without killing him outright. Constitutionally, who gets to make the call that the POTUS is mentally or physically unable to do the job? This had come up before; both Woodrow Wilson and FDR come to mind in that respect, and Eisenhower’s heart attack had raised the issue again. (But not that interestingly.)

As for Israel’s border crisis. The map of Israel embedded in the text of the article, coupled with hindsight, describes it pretty well:

We’ll just let that picture be worth a thousand words, remember what geography the Israelis acquired in subsequent wars, and move on.

The letters to the editor section includes missives concerning the article on modern jazz (that I criticized in Part 4) by two prominent writers on the subject—Nat Hentoff and Whitney Balliett—both of whom pretty much agreed with what I had to say about it.

Our common thread, Sidney Alexander, pans Norman Mailer’s new novel The Deer Park. I have to agree that The Deer Park is a piece of shit by Mailerian standards. The title of Alexander’s review is “Not Even Good Pornography”. While this leads one to wonder just what kind of pornography Alexander preferred, back in the day, I also found it amusing that a novel like The Deer Park could be considered quasi-pornographic. There’s worse on primetime TV in this day and age.

The final article from this issue that I’ll mention is a travelogue about Haiti by Sabine Gova. In the final sections of the piece, the author gets onto the topic of most probable interest to Americans—voodoo and (gasp!) zombies. She has met a talkative native named Justin Villefonte in the dining room of the pension at which she is staying. He turns out to be a lawyer, educated at the Sorbonne. He has (we learn) enemies among the houngans—the voodoo priests—a situation about which he will speak only guardedly. At one point in the discussion he offers this:

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"I want to make known that we Africans have solutions to offer where the white scientists are still guessing. Psychiatric solutions, psychological solutions, even medical perhaps…they are in the hands of the houngans. It’s the houngans who know more about the so-called wonder drugs than the entire scientific world." Now, here come the zombies.

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He tells her of “the use of substances which do not kill but produce a cataleptic state” and of “the burying of a person treated with such a drug” whom the houngan later disinters to exist as “a mere robot without thought or will.” Villefonte hopes to make such things available to modern medicine. Thus, he has earned the wrath of the powerful houngan priestly cult.

Hm. ...whom the houngan later disinters... Can you dig it? X
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The Reporter - Part 4: September 8, 1955

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As the banner on the cover indicates, the September 8, 1955 issue of The Reporter focuses on New York City. While living there, I never found the City to be colorful in quite the same way as suggested by the cover art. Color me concrete and soot. This issue also has several articles about the on-going Geneva Conferences (1954, 1955) and other aspects of then contemporary Cold War geo-politics. Interesting history, but this time I am going to concentrate on the magazine’s coverage of things cultural. As a dim reflection of what is going on in Arizona today, however, I will quote this one bit about the demographic makeup of New York City in 1955:

A generation ago, a rule of thumb had it that the city was a third Jewish, a third Protestant, and a third Catholic. Today, the best estimate of New York’s population puts Catholics at fifty-two per cent, Jews at twenty-five, Protestants at twenty-three—which, on the surface, would support the politician’s dictum that the Catholic Church is the greatest single power in municipal politics. …While Protestant migration to the suburbs has been heaviest, Negro Protestants have largely replaced white Protestants in the city’s percentages. …Meanwhile New York’s largest single ethnic group remains its two million Jews, closely followed by its Italians, and then the Irish and the Germans, who in turn are followed by eight hundred thousand Negroes. …The Puerto Rican…is the city’s biggest emotional problem if not its biggest administrative one. …In a city smarting with so many irritants, angry at dirt, traffic, taxes, and crowding, a scapegoat has had to be found, and the Puerto Rican fills the role currently. He is the one who is cursed when a middle-class neighborhood starts to crumble. His “Bodega Latina” and “Carniceria Hispaniola” are banners announcing to residents that the “invasion” has begun.

And so it goes.

As a novelist, Aldous Huxley is probably best known today for his futuristic fable, Brave New World. As compared to his entire oeuvre, however, Brave New World cannot be evaluated as artistically among the best of his works of fiction. We will briefly discuss below another of his novels.

Huxley happens to have died on November 22, 1963—the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That seems a long time ago. It feels somewhat strange to be holding in one’s hands an issue of a magazine containing a review of a new novel by Huxley; one written when he was younger than I am now. The novel is The Genius and the Goddess. I’ve never read it, and probably never will. The review is by our common thread in this collection of The Reporter, Sydney Alexander. He didn’t much care for the novel, but didn’t want to trash it either. Call the review lukewarm. I will quote in full only the opening and the penultimate paragraphs:

For openers:

The phases of Aldous Huxley, like those of the moon, are luminous dialogues between the powers of light and the powers of darkness. Darkness is human bondage, the flesh; light is nonattachment, an apprehension of the Highest Common Denominator, the metaphysical Ground. Over a long and prolific writing career Huxley has stressed first one and then the other of these terms: sense and spirit, flesh and soul—back and forth in his erudite, witty, and abstract mind has shuttled as if between two ancestors: his Darwinian grandfather, T.H. Huxley, and his pedagogical great-grandfather, Dr. Thomas Arnold.

And toward summing up:

… [T]here has always seemed to be an air of meretriciousness when westerners drink their deepest draughts from Oriental wells. One wonders how much of the cosmic jag results from the exoticism of the liquor. The Huxley in California with its Bahai temples and musical cemeteries and kidney-shaped swimming pools, the Huxley at the corner of Hollywood and Heard—somehow it was difficult not to wonder whether his flights into Nirvana weren’t really rope tricks. Philosophy may be perennial, and the metaphysic Ground may know no East or West. Nevertheless an Englishman in a loincloth is ridiculous.

To be fair to both Huxley and Alexander, the final sentence of this review is:

For the first time we feel that Aldous Huxley has not tried to be clever; for the first time he bows his head and is as mired as the rest of us in the human condition.

This magazine also uses the occasion of the Second Annual Newport Jazz festival (only the second! imagine that!) to launch an article on the advent of “serious jazz scholarship.” This is “serious,” one concludes, as opposed to “shouting, stomping, or cries of “Go, man, go!” To prove that jazz has become worthy of intellectual, highbrow, consideration, the author points out that, “There are record albums entitled ‘Annotations of the Muses,’ ‘Badinage,’ and ‘Innovations in Modern Music.’ Single compositions have titles like ‘Thelonius Epistrophy,’ (sic?) ‘Euphoria,’ ‘Cyclotron,’ ‘Fugetta,’ and ‘Futurity.’

Fugettaboudit. This reporter was obviously sans clue. So, moving right along…

Another book review, perhaps the most striking piece in this issue, is of Dr. Michihiko Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician: August 6—September 30, 1945. Below, an excerpt from the review:

When the bomb fell Dr. Hachiya was badly wounded, but that is not quite the way to say it, for he did not know that a bomb had fallen; he was aware only of a bright flash of light, that his house was collapsing, that he was pulling a piece of broken glass from his throat, that the flesh had been torn from one thigh, and that he was stark naked: “…although I did not feel the least bit of shame, I was disturbed to realize that modesty had deserted me.” With his wife he made his way…to the hospital of which he was the director. He came upon a soldier standing with a towel slung over his shoulder. He asked for the towel to use as a loincloth and the soldier gave it to him but did not say a word. On that day no one said anything. He lost the towel and his wife gave him her apron. Before he reached the hospital he fainted. …the dying and the dead lay in filth in the rooms, the corridors, the entrances, and out of doors. They carried the dead out when they could, cremating them on makeshift pyres. …The stench was all-pervasive… Dr. Hachiya bowed to the dead. He regretted the absence of priests and fitting ceremonial. …His duty was to the living. Despite his physical weakness as the result of his wounds, and his instinctive desire to flee the dead city with his wife, he accepted his duty. That is why Dr. Hachiya’s diary is so proud a testimonial to man’s courage in adversity.

And you thought you were having a bad day.

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The Reporter - Part 3: May 19, 1955

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Several weeks have gone by the boards since my last post concerning the collection of vintage issues of The Reporter that came into my possession was presented here. And several years—nearly six—elapsed between that first issue of The Reporter in the collection and the one now coming to bat. There are no issues to fill the gap between 8/30/49 and the issue under discussion today, dated May 19, 1955. As we have no evidentiary explanation for this hiatus, we will attempt neither speculation on its causes, nor interpretations of its significance. What we can say, since we have it in writing, is that the common thread running through the collection, columnist Sidney Alexander, is no longer an American ex-pat wandering the streets of Florence, Italy interviewing alienated minority former G.I.’s. At this juncture, we learn, he is “teaching in the English Department at Fairleigh Dickinson College. So, out of Tuscany, into New Jersey: we can only hope that there was some kind of half-way house available along the way to help Prof. Alexander acclimate to the culture shock.

Gone from this issue is the urgency of the domestic Red Scare. Gone, too, is the interest we saw in 1949 in the Race Issue. There are no cartoons in this 1955 edition. Still, it is to be hoped that there was sufficient truth proclaimed in the pages of an edition 55 years old this month that some of it at least will have proven to be prophetic. I find that this is the case.

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While Alexander was still writing very much in the wake of WWII in 1949, by 1955 we see him writing a standard book review of a critical biography of Walt Whitman. Along the way, Alexander has this to say:

The American psyche…is woven of these two extremes—the tartly asserted individual and the myth of the Common Man. We’re always shuttling between saving the world for democracy and scowling behind our ocean fronts, those overgrown Walden Ponds.

And a bit further on:

In our jittery age we shy away from figures like Whitman. We just can’t grasp that amoebic all-inclusiveness of his. His impulse to be a universe swallower strikes us as a circus trick; we marvel but we have no desire to do it ourselves. We want sharp boundaries, not inner suspensions; answers, not the coexistence of contradictions.

Well, Alexander doesn’t exactly predict the advent of the Age of Aquarius, LSD, and “In A Gadda Da Vida” there, does he? He concludes as follows:

More than ever we need the sound of Whitman’s voice. A great voice—a wind in the upper branches—not the whine of our poetlings and the ululation of our despair. Lesser writers snap and rot. But he continues to grow—a great live oak, ever utter for us joyous leaves.

“Lesser writers snap and rot.” Hmm. (Kerouac, perhaps? Kerouac, still at this point two years away from fame and avant-garde respectability; more than a decade from rusting out…?)

The focal point of this issue, coming as it does about ten years before this country had gotten itself seriously mired in a pointless and tragic war in southeast Asia, is a series of articles on “Red China.” The banner on the cover announces, Three Windows on Red China. These are: 1. Chou En-lai at the Asia-African Meeting; 2. Mao’s ‘Paradise’ as Seen from India; and 3. Are Religions the Opium of the People? The latter article concerns itself with the struggles of Buddhists (the “liberation” of Tibet comes into play there), Confucians, and Taoists to coexist with a Maoist regime. Strangely, the fate of Chinese Christians does not seem to be of interest here.

But, of interest to me is a mini-review in the “Editor-at-Large” column of the novel Something of Value by Robert Ruark. This is the fictionalized history of the Mau Mau insurgency in colonial Kenya. I read it as a high school student and was strongly affected by it. I recommend it still today.

In the end, I found the most prophetic item in this issue of The Reporter to be a snide little piece of doggerel composed by “Sec”—who I take to be the mag’s poet/humorist-in-residence:

Riviera Emperor

To destiny I will not bao,
xxxFor I would sooner dai
xxxThan leave my croupiers
xxxxxxhai and drai
And ngo to Vietnam nao.

Ha-ha-ha. Is this the attitude that forged the fate of my whole generation?

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Reminiscences: The Reporter- Part 2: 1949

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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.

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Remembrances: The Reporter – Part 1: The Archives

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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.

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