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The Green-Room


ISSUE:  Summer 1934

would have remained pure. The citizen would have sat in the grateful shade of his own vine and fig tree, instead of shuffling in the breadline.

The answer is not difficult. Supposing that the country could have held together at all under such auspices, which is not clear, we should have avoided drowning by refusing to go near the water. American potentialities, in natural resources and in human ingenuity, would have gone undeveloped. True, a militant minority in Russia took an agricultural country and set it on the road to industrial greatness, but they had two necessary helps—the example of the technological forwardness of other peoples, and the device of maximum social control. Jefferson could not conceivably have used either of these elements. It was historically inescapable that America should make progress through private exploitation. Nobody has sung the praises of private capitalism more loudly than Marx.

Unless the whole argument of this paper is mistaken, Hamilton, were he here today, would abhor the disruption in our economic life to which capitalism has brought us. His determination would still be for social control, and he would complete his work by addressing himself to the task of producing economic co-ordination and unity. He would find the materials ready to his hands, for the autonomous concentrations which have gone on in business now for the first time make conversion to national ownership and operation possible. The “Roosevelt Revolution” deserves the name chiefly in the concessions it has been compelled to make to collectivism. The Hamiltonian way would be that of positive plan, not of grudging admission.

Jefferson, so long in retreat, may reappear upon the stage, and he and Hamilton exchange bows. For the individualist ideal is to be realized through collectivist safeguards. Individual self-direction, not possible in a world beset with present hazards, will open before a people who, through concert, have guaranteed themselves both progress and security.

of drama of Yale University. This is his first contribution to the Quarterly.

Waldo Frank, who contributes “Sigmund Freud,” is widely known both for his novels and for his interpretative studies of contemporary cultures. Among the former are “City Block” and “Rahab”; the latter include “Virgin Spain,” “America Hispana,” and “Dawn in Russia.” A new novel by Mr. Frank, “The Death and Birth of David Markand,” is announced for fall publication by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

The Virginia Quarterly has published poems and book discussions by Josephine Pinckney in several issues: “They Shall Return as Strangers,” which employs for its background the sea-islands of Miss Pinckney’s native South Carolina, is her first short story to appear. She is the author of “Sea Drinking Cities,” a volume of verse, and is now working on a novel.

Robert Francis, who lives in South Amherst, Massachusetts, contributed “Dark Sonnets” to the October, 1932, number of the Quarterly. Libktte Woodworth Reese’s verse has appeared frequently in the Virginia Quarterly. Miss Reese is the author of a number of volumes of verse, and her recent work includes two volumes of memoirs dealing with her native city, Baltimore: “A Victorian Village” and “The York Road.”

Of “The Paragon of Animals,” Douglas H. Stewart writes: “I have tried, somewhat in the manner of Aesop, to show how man’s nature is to be many-sided and not ultra-efficient, and that it is his destiny to continue along that path.” Mr. Stewart is a native of Ontario and a graduate in classics of the University of Toronto. After serving with the British army in the War, he lived for some years in England. He is now teaching in a high school in Victoria, British Columbia.

Richard Aldington is known equally well as a poet and a novelist. His earlier work was identified with that of the Imagists; and his “Collected Poems,” recently published, were reviewed in the July, 1934, number of the Quarterly. Recently he has devoted himself chiefly to the novel, his best known novels being “Death of a Hero,” “The Colonel’s Daughter,” and “All Men Are Enemies.” His portrait of his fellow Englishman, Charles Waterton of Walton Hall, “The Squire,” is his first contribution to the Virginia Quarterly.

The author of “Toward Virginia Woolf,” John Hawley Roberts, is a member of the English faculty of Williams College. Mr. Roberts is a native of Illinois and was educated at the University of Chicago. He is the author of, a novel, “Narcissus,” and has contributed to publications of scholarly research, but his essay on the art of Virginia Woolf is his first contribution to a general magazine.

Eugene M. Kayden, professor of economics in the University of the South, served as consulting economist to the War Trade Board, and later to the Department of State and the Department of Agriculture. Helen Hill is coauthor, with Francis P. Miller, of “The Giant of the Western World,” a study of the United States in world affairs, and is a close student of post-War Europe. John Donald Wade, formerly of the faculty of Vanderbilt University, is professor of English in the University of Georgia; he was a contributor to “I’ll Take My Stand,” and, more recently, to “Culture in the South.” Sydney M. Brown is the author of a history of the Middle Ages, and a member of the history faculty of Lehigh University. Hewette Ei.-well Joyce is professor of English in Dartmouth College. Ford K. Brown held a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1928 to 1930, for work on a study he is preparing of Puritan reform in England from 1780 to 1837. He is professor of English in Saint John’s College, Annapolis. Frank L. Owsley is a native of Alabama, and was educated at Alabama Polytechnic Institute and the University of Chicago. He is now professor of history in Vanderbilt University, and is the author of “States’ Rights in the Confederacy” and “King Cotton Diplomacy,” as well as numerous historical papers on the South. W. T. Couch is director of the University of North Carolina Press. He is the editor of the symposium, “Culture in the South,” to which he contributed an essay on “The Negro in the South.”

THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY

REVIEW

EDITORIAL BOARD

James Southam. Wilson Carrot Mason Sparrow Garrard Glenn  John Calvin Metcalf

Stringfellow Barr

Lambert Davis, Managing Editor

The Virginia Quarterly Review is published at the University of Virginia: in April, July, October, and January. Subscription rates: $3.00 the year. Canadian, $3.25; Foreign, $3.50. Single copies, 75 cents.

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