January 1952
In This Issue
Explore the January 1952 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
London
Turkey
Mature Minds Can Bridge This Gulf
Living Under the Shadow
This is the first of a series of articles by distinguished doctors who have learned to live with incurable disease. HENRY E. SIGERIST. M.D., one of the great medical historians of our time, was director of the Institute of the History of Medicine at Leipzig from 1925 to 1932. whence he was called to Johns Hopkins. There he remained until his retirement because of hypertension. At present Dr. Sigerist lives in Switzerland, where he is completing his eight-volume History of Medicine, of which the first volume was published in 1951 by the Oxford University Press. The article which follows is from the book When Doctors Are Patients. In subsequent issues use shall hear from Dr. Fredric Wertham, the late Dr. Abraham Myerson, and others.
The People of the Deer
FARLEY MOWAT made his first trip to the Barren Lands in 1935 when, as a boy of fifteen, he accompanied his great-uncle, “a fanatical student of birds"; and on that trip he had his first sight of the great herds of reindeer, “a half-mile wide river of caribou flowing unhurriedly north.”It was a sight he never forgot. On his discharge from the Canadian Army after six years in the Infantry, his thought was to return to the unmapped sanctuary of the Barren Lands and to study the migration of the caribou and, more important, the People of the Deer, a hardy, dwindling clan of primitive Eskimos.
We All Want Inflation
The ten-cent local telephone call is already a reality in New York City. From the West Coast come reports of the ten-cent daily paper. If an automobile costs more, so does a commuter’s ticket. Wages are still going up. Each new wage and price increase seems to be supported by a “just this once" attitude on all sides, and no powerful opposition to any one of them has developed. JOHN HARRIMAN, financial columnist for the Boston Globe, brings to the fore an all-important question: If no combination of forces in the United States has been able to check the inflationary spiral, who is to blame?
Israel
My Only Indian
Uncle Louis, the hero of ROBERT FONTUNE’S story, was also the hero of his play, The Happy Time, which ran in New York for seventy-seven weeks and which is now being “immortalized in celluloid.”Uncle Louis is a man who believes in the impossible and achieves it with a minimum of fuss. “As for me,”says Mr. Fontaine, “my colorless career includes everything from a window dresser’s assistant in Ottawa to a comptometer operator in the National City Bank of New York. A decade ago I discovered I could write and that writing was the ideal occupation for a man who liked to get up at noon and watch the bluejays go to bed. I have been at it ever since.”
The Stone
The Essentials of Education
An educator intent on reaching the adult as well as the undergraduate, a classicist who draws his understanding from the Greek as closely as from the modern man, SIR RICHARD LINGSTONEis President of Corpus Christi College,Oxford. Recently he visited twenty-one American universities, and the essay which follows has for its basis a lecture he delivered at the American International College at Springfield, Massachusetts.
Rearmament: Too Much, Too Soon
Will the present plan to rearm Western Europe against Communism bring a disastrous inflation and reduce the living standards of our allies? A foremost American economist, Lament Professor at Harvard University, SUMNER H. SLIGHTER believes we must recapture the vision and common sense that inspired the Marshall Plan. Drastic changes, he says, should be made in the huge outlays recently authorized by Congress.
One-Sided Diplomacy
Should the United States send an ambassador to the Vatican? The question has echoed up and down the country since President Truman made his last-minute appointment of General Mark Clark in the closing hours of the Eighty-second Congress. PAUL BLANSHARD, who spent the year 1950 in Rome, believes that such an appointment violates the traditional American principle of equality of all religions before the state, and special treatment for none. He is the author of two widely read books: American Freedom and Catholic Power and Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power.
Relations With the Vatican: Why Not?
Author and Associate Professor of History at Harvard, ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., is a Unitarian who believes that it is in our national interest to have a diplomatic representative at the Vatican. We have had one before, he argues, why not now? Mr. Schlesinger won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1945 with The Age of Jackson, and provoked no little controversy with his next book. The Vital Center.
Guided Missiles Could Have Won
Late in 1942, Allied Intelligence became gravely troubled about the reports of the German secret weapons. Now, for the first time, the magnitude of the German V-bombs and the emergency measures the Allies took to nullify them can be told. JOSEPH WARNER ANGELL served as a historical officer with the Army Air Forces during the war; he was on the proving ground during the CROSSBOW experiments; and after the war he personally interviewed the German experts who had been in charge of the rockets. His article, of which this is the second installment, is based on material drawn from Volume III of The Army Air Forces in World War II, published by the University of Chicago Press. This history, officially approved by the USAF, is a collaborative undertaking directed by Colonel W. J. Paul of the Research Studies Institute, Air University.
The Tower
Artist, sportsman, and country gentleman, JAMES REYNOLDS is a painter of murals, an expert on Palladian architecture, and a connoisseur of Irish ghosts. His beautifully illustrated volume Ghosts in Irish Houses, which combines his two loves, has met with an enthusiastic reception in this country, as has his second volume, Gallery of Ghosts, which goes further abroad to find its themes in India. Restoration England, and in Maine. Mr. Reynolds’s first novel, The Grand Wide Way, was published last winter.
Dance to the Piper
This is the fourth installment of the Atlantic’s abridgment of AGNES DE MILLE’S autobiography, Dance to the Piper. Our serial comprises only about a third of the rich and spirited book which is to be the February selection of the Literary Guild. The granddaughter of Henry George and the daughter of William de Mille, the playwright, Miss de Mille had a long but not inglorious fight as she struggled to establish herself first as a dancer and then as a choreographer of American ballet. Pavlova started her on her course; she studied at the Kosloff School, composed her own dances before she was twenty, made her New York debut (but could get no steady backing), worked for six years in England under Marie Rambert with Hugh Laing as her partner. Then, with her European reputation made, she came home to renew her efforts on the American stage. With her ballet Rodeo, she scored the first of what were to be a series of successes in Oklahoma!, Bloomer Girl, Brigadoon, and Allegro.
Technique and Inspiration: A Year of Poetry
A Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, PETER VIERECK has had two poetry books published by Scribner’s, Terror and Decorum and Strike Through the Mask, with a third, The First Morning, appearing later this year. This spring the Beacon Press will publish his selected political and literary essays, reapplying the ideals of his “humanistic new conservatism.”He is known on a dozen American campuses for his guest lectures on European history and for his poetry readings.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Books: The Editors Like
Reader's Choice
The Forgotten Language
Left Bank Right Bank
The Uprooted
The Hawthornes
Accent on Living
Quirks
F.P.A. divides his time between the pool table of The Players and his home in Connecticut, with occasional forays into the lecture circuits.
Homemade Vitamin Pills
JOHN WHITE is a former Boston and Washington newspaperman now working in the State Department. He served as navigator in U.S. Marine Corps planes throughout the Pacific war, and is the author of “The Navigator,”which appeared in Accent on Living in October, 1944.
Food for Thaw
HANNAH SMITH, who was brought up in the Middle West, now lives in Arcadia,California. She is the author of an amusing autobiography, For Heaven’s Sake (Atlantic-Little, Brown).
Holy Baptism of Margaret
Travel by the Stars
Artist, traveler, and author, SAMUEL CHAMBERLAIN is among the most knowledgeable authorities on French cooking. His Clementine in the Kitchen is a useful handbook and uncommonly pleasant reading.
Fame
Record Reviews
Records are becoming safer to buy. This month yielded few offcenter or bubbly disks and very little treble screech or tape vibrato. Worst current fault: lack of good text with operas, songs, and choral works.
