Word: symposium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Harrlet L. Hardy, Clinical Associate in Preventive Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, made the suggestion at a Graduate School of Public Health symposium. She said, "It is interesting to consider. . . . the data on cigarette smoking males in relationship to lung cancer in combination with working exposures and urban industrial air pollution...
...editorial statement, the Review prescribes the lines of the symposium. The editors cite the tradition of the intellectual's rejection of America the expatriates who felt with Henry James that "the soil of American perception is a poor, little, barren, artificial deposit" and those who remained at home to rail against the "booboisic" and capitalist reaction. All this has changed, however, the editors declare. "The American artist and intellectual no longer feels 'disinherited' . . . most writers . . . want to be very much a part of American life." Essential to this change, the Review decides, is the recognition of America as the defender...
From the contributors to the symposium, whether Reinhold Niebuhr or Norman Mailer, the reader receives an impression of profound dissatisfaction with the American cultural context. The impression is seldom one of complete disillusionment, though bitter essays by Mailer and Irving Howe come close, but in general a picture of hopes very far from fulfillment...
...symposium, however, is not simply a wail from intellectuals who feel the constrictions of American culture. Approaching the problem less subjectively, social scientists like Margaret Mead and David Riesman present a more balanced view of American society, and several contributors, notably Kronenberger and Sidney Hook turn their fire on the posturings of the intellectuals rather than on the inadequacies of American culture. Kronenberger asks whether "our literary intellectuals are not more aloof than alienated . . . we might wish for a few children who should cry out from time to time: 'But the Emperor has no clothes...
When Hook declares that our cultural life "suffers more from mediocrity than from frustration," he points up the real problem--to find a well spring of creative vitality. In the tensions of a nation not yet matured but propelled to leadership, the symposium suggests that such a source may be found...