Word: kaplan
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...JUSTIN KAPLAN...
...term only begins to describe Lincoln Steffens. Biographer Justin Kaplan does the rest with the same clarity, critical intelligence and warm grip on the American past that he demonstrated in his Pulitzer-prizewinning biography of Mark Twain. Lincoln Steffens appears at a time when the achievements of his particular brand of muckraking, like that of Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair and Ray Stannard Baker, are all but forgotten. Today is the age of megamuck and a more sophisticated breed of raker. With the exception of Watergate, the corrective campaigns of S.S. McClure's magazine, where Steffens and his colleagues launched...
Awaiting the Messiah. Steffens belonged to what Kaplan calls "American grass-roots radicalism" which is marked by hunger for drastic solutions and "an inclination to spend their time and spirit cussing out the government and the bank while awaiting the arrival of the messiah." Steffens was inflamed by the redemptive possibilities of the Russian Revolution. He stumped for Bolshevism as the hope of Europe and in 1919 was even a member of William C. Bullitt's secret mission to Moscow to learn on what terms the Reds would negotiate with the Paris Peace Commission. Steffens' famous pronouncement...
...black psychiatrist on the stand to testify that the city's 71% black population has "widespread feelings of hostility and rage" toward the Nixon Administration. Judge Gerhard Gesell dismissed Chapin's petition as "an affront to the jury system." Another criminal expert, Stanford Law Professor John Kaplan, takes a somewhat different stance. The Watergate defendants might very well not "get as fair a trial as if they were black and Democratic. But so what? A fair trial means as fair a trial as we can give them within reason...
Barn Door. Kaplan's flexible definition is a reminder of the difficulties of denning fairness. One all too common line of thinking holds that a "fair" jury promises a fifty-fifty chance of acquittal. In fact, fair jurors are expected to begin impartially, regardless of previous impressions, then follow the evidence to whatever conclusion it demands. But once judge, prosecution and defense have accepted a panel to do that job, an immediate question arises-particularly in notorious cases. Can the jurors' impartiality be sustained in the face of a barrage of publicity? A judge can reduce the danger...