American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  298 [Gide on American literature]: Smith and Miner, p. 21.

  [French appreciation of Hemingway]: see ibid., ch. 8 and passim; Roger Asselineau, “French Reactions to Hemingway’s Works Between the Two World Wars,” in Asselineau, ed., The Literary Reputation of Hemingway in Europe (New York University Press, 1965), pp. 39-72; Peyre, p. 435.

  [Maurois on Hemingway’s subjects]: Maurois, “Ernest Hemingway,” in Carlos Baker, ed., Hemingway and His Critics: An International Anthology (Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 38.

  [Sales of French-language Bell Tolls]: Smith and Miner, p. 30.

  [French appreciation of Faulkner]: see ibid., ch. 9.

  [“Magical, fantastic”]: quoted in ibid., pp. 129-30.

  [Sartre on Faulkner and de Beauvoir]: ibid., pp. 62-63.

  [Faulkner as “universal writer”]: see ibid., p. 141.

  [German on cadging American books]: Hans Magnus Enzenberger, “Mann, Kafka and the Katzenjammer Kids,” New York Times Book Review, November 11, 1985, pp. 1, 37-39, quoted at p. 37.

  [“Thoughtful and barbaric”]: quoted in Mayne, p. 109.

  299 [Hemingway’s politics]: see Scott Donaldson, By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (Viking, 1977), ch. 5; John Killinger, Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism (University of Kentucky Press, 1960), esp. ch. 5; Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 197-202, ch. 10 and passim; Ray B. West, Jr., “Ernest Hemingway: The Failure of Sensibility,” Sewanee Review, vol. 53 (1945), pp. 120-35; Lionel Trilling, “Hemingway and His Critics,” in Baker, Hemingway and His Critics, pp. 61-70.

  [“You believe in Life”]: Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (Scribner, 1940), p. 305. [“Presentness of the past”]: Hyatt H. Waggoner, “William Harrison Faulkner,” in John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper, 1974), pp. 343-45, quoted at p. 344.

  299 [Faulkner in two American traditions]: ibid., p. 344.

  [Faulkner and public and private values]: Faulkner, “Speech of Acceptance upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature,” in The Faulkner Reader (Random House, 1954), pp. 3-4; Hyatt H. Waggoner, William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World (University of Kentucky Press, 1959), esp. chs. 11-12; R. W. B. Lewis, “William Faulkner: The Hero in the New World,” in Robert Penn Warren, ed., Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 204-18; Edmund Wilson, “William Faulkner’s Reply to the Civil-Rights Program,” in ibid., pp. 219-25; Vincent F. Hopper, “Faulkner’s Paradise Lost,” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 23, no. 3 (Summer 1947), pp. 405-20; see also Joseph Blotner, Faulkner, 2 vols. (Random House, 1974).

  [“Moving from a tenor”]: quoted in Hopper, p. 420.

  300 [“We prate of freedom”]: quoted in George W. Nitchie, Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Frost: A Study of a Poet’s Convictions (Duke University Press, 1960), pp. 88-89.

  [“Keep off each other”]: “Build Soil—A Political Pastoral,” in Robert Frost, Complete Poems (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), pp. 421-30, quoted at p. 429.

  [“Freedom I’d like to give”]: quoted in Lawrance R. Thompson, Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost (Henry Holt, 1942), p. 216; see also ibid., pp. 177-232 passim; Nitchie; Malcolm Cowley, “Frost: A Dissenting Opinion” and “The Case Against Mr. Frost: II,” New Republic, vol. 111, no. 11 (September 11, 1944), pp. 312-13, and no. 12 (September 18, 1944), pp. 345-47; William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (Oxford University Press, 1984).

  [Hicks on Frost]: Hicks, “The World of Robert Frost,” New Republic, vol. 65, no. 835 (December 3, 1930), pp. 77-78, quoted at p. 78.

  [“Wise primitive”]: Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” in Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (Putnam, 1959), pp. 337-58, quoted at p. 343.

  [Miller]: Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (Grove Press, 1987); Leonard Moss, Arthur Miller (Twayne, 1967); Robert A. Martin, ed., The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller (Viking, 1978); Benjamin Nelson, Arthur Miller: Portrait of a Playwright (David McKay, 1970); Richard Corrigan, ed., Arthur Miller (Prentice-Hall, 1969). [“Right dramatic form”]: Miller, “The Family in Modern Drama,” in Martin, pp. 69-85, quoted at p. 85.

  301 [“I always said”]: Miller, “Introduction to the Collected Plays,” in ibid., pp. 113-70, quoted at p. 141; see also Richard T. Brucher, “Willy Loman and The Soul of a New Machine: Technology and the Common Man,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 17, no. 3 (December 1983), pp. 325-36.

  [Europeans on America’s commitment to freedom]: see Wagner in Kaiser and Schwarz, pp. 19-32, esp. pp. 24-25; see also Jean-Paul Sartre, “Individualism and Conformism in the United States,” in Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, Annette Michelson, trans. (Criterion Books, 1955), pp. 97-106.

  [Shaw on Americans]: quoted in Wagner, p. 25.

  [Khrushchev’s meeting with American labor leaders]: “Free Labor Meets Khrushchev,” in Reuther, Papers, pp. 299-315, quoted at pp. 312, 313; Khrushchev in America (Crosscurrents Press, 1960), pp. 124-40; see also Herbert Mitgang, Freedom to See: The Khrushchev Broadcast and Its Meaning for America (Fund for the Republic, April 1958); Alexander Rapoport, “The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America,” Russian Review, vol. 16, no. 3 (July 1957), pp. 3-14; Alexander Anikst, “American Books and Soviet Readers,” New World Review, vol. 4, no. 3 (March 1956), pp. 18-20; Melville J. Ruggles, “American Books in Soviet Publishing,” Slavic Review, vol. 20 (1961), pp. 419-35.

  7. The Free and the Unfree

  303 [Lives of the poor]: see Robert L. Heilbroner, The Great Ascent: The Struggle for Economic Development in Our Time (Harper, 1963), chs. 2-3; see also Aidan W. Southall and Peter C. W. Gutkind, Townsmen in the Making: Kampala and Its Suburbs (East African Institute of Social Research, 1957).

  [Untouchable children in lime pits]: Margaret Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India (Simon and Schuster, 1949), ch. 14.

  304 [Division of world GNP]: P. N. Rothenstein-Rodan, “International Aid for Underdeveloped Countries,” Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 43, no. 2 (May 1961), p. 118 (Table l-A).

  304 [GNP per capita]: ibid., p. 118 (Table 1-B); see also ibid., p. 126 (Table 2-C); Paul G. Hoffman, World Without Want (Harper, 1962), pp. 38-39 (Table 1).

  [Population growth and its causes]; J. O. Hertzler, The Crisis in World Population (University of Nebraska Press, 1956), pp. 20-21 (Table 1), p. 22 (Figure 1), p. 23 (Table 2).

  [Nationalism, war, and decolonization]: Peter Worsley, The Third World, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1970), chs. 2-3; T. O. Lloyd, The British Empire, 1558-1981 (Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 276-92, 312-20; Milton Osborne, Region of Revolt: Focus on Southeast Asia (Penguin, 1970), ch. 5; Tony Smith, “Introduction,” in Tony Smith, ed., The End of the European Empire: Decolonization After World War II (D. C. Heath, 1975), pp. vii-xxiii; Rudolf von Albertini, “The Impact of the Two World Wars on the Decline of Colonialism,” in ibid., pp. 3-19; William R. Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1978). [Worsley on sense of common fate]: Worsley, p. 84.

  [“O masters, lords”]: “The Man with the Hoe,” in Markham, The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (Doubleday, Page, 1913), pp. 15-18, quoted at pp. 17, 18.

  305 [Imperviousness of Indian villages]: see Kusum Nair, Blossoms in the Dust: The Human Element in Indian Development (Gerald Duckworth, 1961).

  [Forms of nationalist revolt and postcolonial government]: see Worsley, chs. 3-5.

  The Boston Irish

  306 [Numbers of Irish immigrants into Boston, late 1840s-1850s]: Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1865: A Study in Acculturation (Harvard University Press, 1941), p. 229 (Table 5).

  [Irish famine]: Thomas Gallagher, Paddy’s Lament, Ireland 1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred (Harcourt, 1982), ch. 1 and passim; Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845-9 (Hamish Hamilton, 1962); R. Dudley Edwards
and T. Desmond Williams, eds., The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845-52 (Browne and Nolan, 1956).

  [Famine deaths and emigration]: see William P. MacArthur, “Medical History of the Famine,” in Edwards and Williams, pp. 308-12; William V. Shannon, The American Irish (Macmillan, 1966), p. 1; Oliver MacDonagh, “Irish Emigration to the United States of America and the British Colonies during the Famine,” in Edwards and Williams, pp. 317-88, esp. p. 388 (Appendix 1).

  [Ireland under British rule]: J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modem Ireland, 1603-1923 (Knopf, 1966); T. W. Freeman, Pre-Famine Ireland: A Study in Historical Geography (Manchester University Press, 1957); Thomas A. Emmet, Ireland Under English Rule, or A Plea for the Plaintiff, 2 vols. (Knickerbocker Press, 1903); Lawrence J. McCaffrey, The Irish Question, 1800-1922 (University of Kentucky Press, 1968); Edward M. Levine, The Irish and Irish Politicians: A Study of Cultural and Social Alienation (University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), ch. 2; Kevin B. Nowlan, “The Political Background,” in Edwards and Williams, ch. 3; Shannon, ch. 1.

  [“Always went forth”]: quoted in Shannon, p. 9.

  307 [Irish in Boston]: Handlin; Levine, ch. 3; Donald B. Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921 (University of North Carolina Press, 1963), esp. ch. 3; Shannon, ch. 11, also ch. 2; see also Gallagher, ch. 23; Woodham-Smith, ch. 12.

  [Irish in sports]: Carl Wittke, The Irish in America (Louisiana State University Press, 1956), ch. 24; Shannon, pp. 95-102.

  [Irish in politics]: Levine, esp. chs. 4-5; Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1954), ch. 2; Handlin, ch. 5; Shannon, chs. 4-5; Edgar Lin, Beyond Pluralism: Ethnic Politics in America (Scott, Foresman, 1970), ch. 8; see also Wittke, ch. 10; Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (MIT Press, 1963), pp. 217-87.

  308 [Irish economic progress]: Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in an American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Harvard University Press, 1973), esp. pp. 130-44, 160-75; Handlin, esp. ch. 3; Cole, chs. 3-4, 7, and passim; Wittke, chs. 3-5, 7, 21; Marjorie R. Fallows, Insh Americans: Identity and Assimilation (Prentice-Hall, 1979), chs. 4-5; H. M. Gitelman, “The Waltham System and the Coming of the Irish,” Labor History, vol. 8, no. 3 (Fall 1967), pp. 227-53; Stephen Birmingham, Real Lace: America’s Irish Rich (Harper, 1973); Shannon, ch. 6.

  308 [“None need apply”]: quoted in Handlin, p. 67.

  [Irish in Puck]: John J. Appel, “From Shanties to Lace Curtain: The Irish Image in Puck, 1876-1910,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 13 (1971), pp. 365-75, quoted at p. 367; see also Shannon, ch. 9.

  [Continued social exclusion of Irish]: see Helen Howe, The Gentle Americans, 1864-1960: Biography of a Breed (Harper, 1965), pp. 97-99; Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (E. P. Dutton, 1947), esp. ch. 15; Birmingham; Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, Times to Remember (Doubleday, 1974), pp. 49-52; Richard J. Whalen, The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy (New American Library, 1964), pp. 24-27, 34, 59, 401-2, 417-18; David E. Koskoff, Joseph P. Kennedy: A Life and Times (Prentice-Hall, 1974),pp. 18-19, 378-80.

  309 [Limits of Insh liberalism]: see Levine, chs. 4-6; Mann, ch. 2; Glazer and Moynihan, pp. 229-34, 264-74; Liu, ch. 8; Fallows, ch. 8.

  [Two Patrick Kennedys]: Tim Pal Coogan, “Sure, and It’s County Kennedy Now,” New York Times Magazine, June 23, 1963, pp. 7-9, 32-36; Koskoff, chs. 1-2; Whalen, ch. 1 ; see also the genealogical tables in James MacGregor Burns, Edward Kennedy and the Camelot Legacy (Norton, 1976), pp. 344-46.

  [Honey Fitz]: Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (Simon and Schuster, 1987), book 1 ; John Henry Cutler, “Honey Fitz”: Three Steps to the White House (Bobbs-Merrill, 1962); Kennedy, chs. 2-5; Francis Russell, The Great Interlude: Neglected Events and Persons from the First World War to the Depression (McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 162-90.

  310 [Joe Kennedy]: Whalen; Koskoff; Goodwin, book 2 passim; Michael R. Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (Norton, 1980); Birmingham, ch. 16; Matthew Josephson, The Money Lords: The Great Finance Capitalists, 1925-1950 (Weybright and Talley, 1972), pp. 176-87.

  [John Kennedy and Catholicism]: see Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1982), p. 61; Lawrence H. Fuchs, John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism (Meredith Press, 1967); James MacGregor Burns, John Kennedy: A Political Profile (Harcourt, 1960), ch. 13; Donald F. Crosby, God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950-1957 (University of North Carolina Press, 1978), p.35; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 107-8; see also Goodwin, p. 635.

  [Kennedy and liberalism]: see Schlesinger, pp. 9-19; Burns, Profile, pp. 73-81, 132-36, 264-68; Crosby, pp. 106-7; Herbert S. Parmet, Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (Dial Press, 1980), pp. 175-82, 188-89, 461-62,and ch. 26; David Burner and Thomas R. West, The Torch Is Passed: The Kennedy Brothers and American Liberalism (Atheneum, 1984), ch. 3 passim.

  [Schlesinger on Kennedy’s detachment]: Schlesinger, p. 108; see also Goodwin, pp. 752-55.

  [Kennedy’s womanizing]: see Joan Blair and Clay Blair, Jr., The Search For JFK (Berkley, 1976), passim; Wills, chs. 1-2.

  311 [Curley]: Joseph F. Dineen, The Purple Shamrock: The Hon. James Michael Curley of Boston (Norton, 1949); James Michael Curley, I’d Do It Again (Prentice-Hall, 1957); Russell, pp. 191-212; Shannon, ch. 12.

  [Kennedy’s first congressional campaign]: Parmet, ch. 10; Whalen, ch. 22; Blair and Blair, part 4; Goodwin, pp. 705-21; Koskoff, pp. 405-9; Burns, Profile, ch. 4; Kennedy, pp. 306-20.

  [The two Joseph Russos]: Koskoff, p. 407; Cutler, p. 308; independent anonymous source.

  [Kennedy in the House]: Blair and Blair, chs. 41-43; Parmet, chs. 11-12; Burns, Profile, ch. 5; Goodwin, ch. 40.

  312 [“Felt like a worm there”]: Interview with Senator John F. Kennedy, 1959.

  [Kennedy’s Senate campaign]: Parmet, ch. 13; Burns, Profile, ch. 6; Goodwin, pp. 755-68; Kennedy, pp. 320-27; Crosby, pp. 108-11; Whalen, ch. 23; Koskoff, pp. 413-17.

  312 [Kennedy’s distance from other Democrats]: see Parmet, p. 254.

  [Joe Kennedy and the Post]: Koskoff, pp. 415-16; Whalen, pp. 429-31; Parmet, pp. 242-43.

  313 [Kennedy and McCarthyism]: Burns, Profile, ch. 8; Crosby, pp. 108-13, 205-16; Parmet, pp. 243-52, 300-11.

  The Southern Poor

  [Macon County, 1930s]: Charles S. Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (University of Chicago Press, 1934; reprinted 1979), p. 100.

  314 [FDR on the South]: message to the Conference on Economic Conditions of the South, July 4, 1938, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 7, pp. 421-22, quoted at p. 421.

  [Proportion of American poor black families in South]: Alan Batchelder, “Poverty: The Special Case of the Negro,” in Louis A. Ferman, Joyce L. Kornbluh, and Alan Haber, eds., Poverty in America (University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 114.

  [Plessy v. Ferguson?: 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

  [Black poverty and class structure in South]: see John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 3rd ed. (Doubleday Anchor, 1957), ch. 5 and passim; Morton Rubin, Plantation County (University of North Carolina Press, 1951), pp. 123-32 and passim, Nathan Hare, “Recent Trends in the Occupational Mobility of Negroes, 1930-1960: An Intracohort Analysis,” Social Forces, vol. 44, no. 2 (December 1965), pp. 166-73; Batchelder in Ferman et al., pp. 112-19; Tom Kahn, “The Economics of Equality,” in ibid., pp. 153-72; Vivian W. Henderson, The Economic Status of Negroes: In the Nation and in the South (Southern Regional Council, 1963); Charles S. Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South (1941; Schocken Books, 1907); Johnson, Shadow; Robert Coles, Children of Crisis (Little, Brown, 1967-78), vol. 2, chs. 4, 7; V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knopf, 1949)
, esp. part 5; Truman M. Pierce et al., White and Negro Schools in the South: An Analysis of Biracial Education (Prentice-Hall, 1955); see also Neil R. Peirce, The Deep South States of America (Norton, 1974); Jack Bass and Walter DeVries, The Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and Political Consequence Since 1945 (Basic Books, 1976).

  [Peonage]: Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 188 and passim.

  [Rowan in the South]: Rowan, South of Freedom (Knopf, 1952).

  [“Momma, momma”]: ibid., p. 40.

  315 [Black migration from Southeast, 1950s]: Selz C. Mayo and C. Horace Hamilton, “The Rural Negro Population of the South in Transition,” Phylon, vol. 24, no. 2 (July 1963), p. 165.

  [Decline in proportion of American blacks in Southeast, 1940-60]: ibid., p. 161.

  [Decline in black farm population]: ibid. (Table 1).

  [Migrant workers]: Dale Wright, They Harvest Despair: The Migrant Farm Worker (Beacon Press, 1965); Truman Moore, The Slaves We Rent (Random House, 1965); Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Macmillan, 962), pp. 48-56; Coles, vol. 2, chs. 3, 8.

  [Black migration within South and economic opportunities]: Mayo and Hamilton, pp. 162, 166-71.

  [Black women as household or service laborers]: ibid., p. 168 (Table 5).

  316 [Appalachia]: Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1963), esp. parts 5-7; William J. Page, Jr., and Earl E. Huyck, “Appalachia: Realities of Deprivation,” in Ben B. Seligman, ed., Poverty as a Public Issue (Free Press, 1965), pp. 152-76; Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg, Our Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 1977); Roul Tunley, “The Strange Case of West Virginia,” Saturday Evening Post, vol. 232, no. 32 (February 6, 1960), pp. 19-21, 64-66; William H. Turner, “Blacks in Appalachian America: Reflections on Biracial Education and Unionism,” Phylon, vol. 44, no. 3 (1983), pp. 198-208.