Here’s a gem from our Spring 1968 issue: Bruce Russett’s “Rich and Poor in 2000 A.D.: The Great Gulf”:

By many tests the world of the not-too-distant future will be a far better one than the present. We have confident and compelling predictions of vast automation, greatly diminishing the amount of physical drudgery required in production and freeing members of the labor force either for leisure or for intellectually stimulating and satisfying work. Time and facilities for the leisured pursuit of science and the arts seem within reach for many. We have the prospect of major breakthroughs in medical science, with artificial organs and the control of killer diseases. We are promised supersonic transports to circle the earth at three times the speed of sound, and instantaneous electronic communication with data banks and libraries anywhere. A computerized financial system for pay, credit, and tax collection is virtually in preparation. In a recent RAND Corporation survey of scientists who should know, the likelihood of a manned landing on Mars and of a permanent base on the moon by 2000 A.D. was taken for granted. There is held out to us the image of a new Eden, a stable period wherein many of the most unsettling aspects of modern life may be brought under control and we can more fully reap its great benefits.

But how many of the three billion people on this globe can afford to circumnavigate it? How soon will the Indian villager install his automated farm and devote himself to experimentation in his laboratory? Have you paid a hospital bill recently? It is crucial to recognize that the gains from these developments will not apply at all equally to all men.

The Yale international relations scholar figured that none of these benefits would be of much good to the global poor. So, instead, he sought to envision what the gap between the global rich and the global poor would be like 32 years hence.

For the rich, things look pretty rosy in 2000 A.D. We’ll be able to afford organ transplants (true), most forms of cancer will be cured (not hardly), a “major breakthrough” in life expectancy in the U.S. and Europe will extend lifespans to a century (not yet), and a severed head could be kept alive indefinitely (thankfully, no). “Millions of middle-aged and elderly Americans and Europeans will doubtless shortly wear pace-makers” (bulls-eye), and the blind will be given radar (unawesomely, no).

It’s a mixed bag for the poor. The bad news is that they’ll live just half as long as “a citizen of the privileged West.” (This is precisely correct.) The good news is that the literacy rate in poor countries will climb from 25%, such that “the bulk of the populations will be literate” (again, precisely correct), fresh water will be available to them by “economical desalinization of sea water” (nope—it’s hugely expensive), they’ll enjoy the “cheap manufacture of palatable synthetic food” (such food is commonplace but, weirdly, only the global rich have access to the stuff), and income will be available by “the profitable ‘mining’ of sea water for minerals” (nope).

Come 2000 AD, things look dim for the world in some crucial regards. “The poor half of the world will not able to challenge the rich fifth for control—but it will have the ability to harass the rich and bring the entire system into chaos.” (Yup. Exhibit A: September 11, 2001.) “A third of the [poor] population [will live] in cities of 20,000 or more.” (Russett is correct, but the cities are a great deal larger than he envisioned—urban slums are the theme of poverty for the new millennium) “Asia and Africa are likely to comprise a huge slum in the social as well as material sense, with close parallels to present-day Harlem.” (1968 Harlem was a far sight better than the enormous slums of Asia and Africa. Kiberia’s half million citizens and the five million Mumbai shantytown dwellers support Russett’s theory, though cities like Tokyo, Tianjin, Wuhn and Manila show that this is far too broad a brush with which to paint half of the globe.)

All in all, Russett’s is a rather prescient look at the world of 2000. I have to wonder what he would have forecast for himself these many years later. In updating his bio, I learned that Bruce Russett still teaches at Yale, and in the intervening four decades he has written dozens of books and become a widely-known, well-respected political scientist.

To see more paleofuturism, I recommend Paleo-Future, a blog that looks back at similar long-ago forecasts of the far-off world of today.

VQR has always carried a few pages of advertising in each issue. One of our long-time advertisers was Bell Telephone. I recently wedged a 1953 volume into a scanner and saved a few of my favorites from the year:

Of the three, one of them is sexist, one is racist, and all are gloriously anachronistic. I especially like the advice to use telephone numbers when calling somebody and the suggestion that you write to Bell to order “an attractive booklet for your telephone numbers.”

John W. Aldridge reviewed Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” upon its release in our Spring 1953 issue:

I confess that I am unable to share in the prevailing wild enthusiasm for this new book of Hemingway’s, “The Old Man and the Sea.” It is of course a remarkable advance over his last novel; and it has a purity of line and a benignity, a downright saintliness, of tone which would seem to indicate not merely that he has sloughed off his former emotional fattiness but that he has expanded and deepened his spiritual perspective in a way that must strike us as extraordinary. But one must take care not to push these generosities too far, if only because they spill over so easily into that excess of blind charity we all tend to feel for Hemingway each time he pulls out of another slump and attains to the heroism of simply writing well once again. I have these standards in mind when I say that “The Old Man and the Sea” seems to me a work of distinctly minor Hemingway fiction.

It wasn’t for another decade that it became en vogue to lambaste “The Old Man and the Sea.” This was demonstrated most spectacularly in the form of Robert P. Weeks’ devastating fisking, “Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea.” Perhaps we were ahead of our time. Or perhaps, in light of Hemingway’s 1953 Pulitzer and 1954 Nobel Prize, we were just wrong.

Michael Pollan’s January release of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” came as welcome news to a newly-created generation of foodies. It was Pollan who (arguably) created this generation of foodies, with his 2007 book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” While the latter explained the problems with the American diet, the former provided solutions. Laura Shapiro summed up the thesis Pollan’s latest book for Slate:

The science of nutrition, he argues, has little to do with food and has no business influencing our eating habits. Scientists don’t yet understand precisely what makes healthful foods healthful; they haven’t identified the full range of nutrients, and they have no idea whether packaged products “enriched” with factory-made vitamins and minerals are adequate substitutes for whole, natural foods.

If all of this seems a little familiar, I congratulate you on your sixty-one year subscription to VQR. Economist and engineer David Cushman Coyle reviewed a similar book in our Autumn 1947 issue:

“Tomorrow’s Food” by James Rorty and N. Philip Norman is a crusading book, written in anger and disgust against the conditions that have undermined the health of most of the American people. Whatever may be the world situation, there is enough to eat in this country, if we would eat it instead of wasting it by wrongheaded food habits.

Apparently the nearest thing to a general prescription, good for whatever ails you, is quite simple: never eat white flour or refined sugar. After that, don’t eat white rice, over-processed foods or “refined” food in general. The nearer you come to gnawing it raw, the healthier you will be.

[...]

The indignant part of the book is directed against the commercial bakers and the many processors of food who have found it profitable to take out the food values in order to get a product that would be easy to store and ship; and against government officials who have been pressured into consenting to “enrichment” of white bread when what the people clearly needed was a darker bread; and against scientists and medical authorities who have compromised at points where in the face of commercial advantage the scientific facts at least should have been kept clear.

Good luck finding a copy of “Tomorrow’s Food” (they’re as scarce as hen’s teeth), though “In Defense of Food” sounds like a reasonable substitute. If this back-to-our-roots eating concept doesn’t catch on, expect a third book in 2069. Watch this space for a review.

Things have been tense in Bolivia for the past week after Santa Cruz residents voted overwhelmingly to become substantially autonomous of the national government. President Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president, has been socializing the nation, just last week seizing the telephone company and a trio of energy companies at the barrel of a gun. The landlocked nation is the poorest in South America. Its wealthy Santa Cruz province comprises the eastern third of the country, and they’re not willing to accept Morales’ plan to seize their assets to redistribute to the west. Morales and his Venezuelan ally, Hugo Chávez, insist that the United States is behind the Santa Cruz uprising.

If all of this sounds familiar, that means you’ve been paying attention. Edmundo Paz Soldán’s “Santa Cruz: Bolivia’s ‘Other Country’” was published on our website in conjunction with the release of our Fall 2006 issue dedicated to the issues of South America:

While the Eastern valley and the Andes are constantly struggling, Santa Cruz has a carnival atmosphere heavily influenced by Brazil’s boundless optimism and exuberance. In the Andean world scarcity is the norm; Santa Cruz is the land of plenty. In a word, Santa Cruz works; the rest of the country doesn’t.

We’ve addressed Bolivia’s economic and geographic divisions before, too. Lloyd Mallan took up the topic in our Spring 1944 issue with “Bolivia: Revolt and Counter-Revolt“:

It is no exaggeration to say that the recent Bolivian revolution is a synthesis of everything that we are fighting for and against in this war. [...] Bolivia, with the possible exception of Paraguay, has the doubtful distinction of claiming the most exploited and oppressed working-class in South America.

At the time, Great Britain’s efforts to build a railway to Santa Cruz had fallen a few miles short. It wasn’t for another decade that the connection was made, Paz Soldán explains, and it was decades until its development in isolation allowed it to develop a gravity of its own. It’s those physics that now threaten to pull apart the nation.

Saturday’s Washington Post brought the news of the death of writer, archivist and adventurer Leonard Rapport, who turns out to have been a contributor to VQR back in 1936. The 95-year-old Army veteran was one of the great scholars of 18th century documents about the founding of the United States, an employee of the National Archives, and an author of fiction and nonfiction alike. After his 1984 retirement he set about hiking. He completed the bulk of the southern third of the Appalachian Trail (Tennessee/North Carolina through Virginia) and walked coast to coast across the British Isles. He was 80 years old when he walked across Ireland.

“The Night the Bucket Fell” appeared in the Summer 1936 issue, where it was published alongside work by Robert Penn Warren, Charles A. Beard, economist Broadus Mitchell, Herbert Read, R.P. Blackmur and John Peale Bishop. It was just one year after his graduation from the University of North Carolina.

To mark the occasion of Leonard Rapport’s death, we’ve made public “The Night the Bucket Fell,” his story of a crew working on one of the many enormous concrete dams constructed by the United States Reclamation Service during the Depression. In the mold of Mr. Rapport, this story has only become hardier with time.

President George Washington was a weird guy. He was an anachronism in his own time, a stiff, shy man who really never fit in. His contemporaries were legendary intellectuals, but Washington had no interest or education in matters philosophical or scientific. As Charlottesville’s Thomas Jefferson put it, Washington had “neither copiousness of ideas nor fluency of words.”

There’s a famous story about Washington, related here by Michael Novak, author of Washington’s God:

Professor Morgan tells this probably apocryphal story: One evening during the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Washington’s friends were commenting on the reserved and remote manner Washington maintained, even among his closest friends. Gouverneur Morris countered that he could be as familiar with Washington as with any one else. Alexander Hamilton offered to provide a dinner if Morris would simply walk up to Washington, slap him on the back and greet him jovially. So, a few evenings later, Morris approached Washington, bowed, and placed his left hand on Washington’s shoulder and said, “My dear General, I am very happy to see you look so well.” Immediately, Washington reached up, removed Morris’s hand, stared icily at him, and stepped back in silence until Morris retreated into the crowd.

Washington was also a bad-ass — a giant of a man, a self-made hero, a man of virtue; in short, the very model of a modern major-general. This was the fundamental conundrum of Washington’s life: he worked hard to cultivate respect and adoration from Americans, but was so caught up in that persona that he couldn’t breach the wall he’d built between himself and the world.

All of this is by way of introduction to Gordon Wood’s “The Greatness of George Washington” from our Spring 1992 issue. Wood recounts Washington’s rise to power and the regret and uncertainty that he felt about each new post and every new responsibility thrust upon him. After his two presidential terms elapsed, Washington watched helplessly as partisan politics took over, and he at last found himself so far removed from society that he could no longer relate to his ostensible peers. It was, of course, Washington who had made partisan politics possible; “the great experiment”^* allowed nations to be led by men of ideas, rather than high-minded war heros. The irony may well have escaped him.

* One of these days I’m going to chart the frequency with which the phrase “the great experiment” has appeared in VQR each year since its 1925 founding. When did we stop thinking of the United States as an experiment?