The Communication Gap

The Liberal Establishment, by M. Stanton Evans. Devin-Adair. $5.95 Writing last November 3 in these pages, M. Stanton Evans called attention to the remarkable return of a classic American folk-hero, the political pamphleteer. He had in hand then three works (A Choice Not an Echo, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, None Dare Call It Treason) whose total sales, in 1964, may easily have exceeded ten million copies. Each book, Evans noted, had been published by an obscure if not strictly one-shot press. He concluded that the situation was ominous: “The appearance of these volumes and their popular reception is dramatic warning to a communications industry which has warped its product to Liberal biases. Had the commercial publishers done the job they claim to do, it is unlikely such books would have been written, and certain that, if written, they would not have found so enormous an audience. When the nation’s best-sellers are produced in Alton, 111., Florissant, Mo. and Canyon, Tex., rather than in the giant publishing houses of New York, the evidence is good that the communications gap has reached revolutionary dimensions.”

That kind of pamphleteering answers a psychological need. When a reasoned, balanced, polite discourse is refused a hearing not for one year or two but for thirty years, then one is tempted to assume that only a hyperbolic attack will gain any notice, and the total assault feels like welcome catharsis after the long period of intolerable inactivity. So the pamphleteers of ’64.

WR

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William F. Rickenbacker

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The Liberal Establishment, by M. Stanton Evans. Devin-Adair. $5.95 Writing last November 3 in these pages, M. Stanton Evans called attention to the remarkable return of a classic American folk-hero, the political pamphleteer. He had in hand then three works (A Choice Not an Echo, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, None Dare Call It Treason) whose total sales, in 1964, may easily have exceeded ten million copies. Each book, Evans noted, had been published by an obscure if not strictly one-shot press. He concluded that the situation was ominous: “The appearance of these volumes and their popular reception is dramatic warning to a communications industry which has warped its product to Liberal biases. Had the commercial publishers done the job they claim to do, it is unlikely such books would have been written, and certain that, if written, they would not have found so enormous an audience. When the nation’s best-sellers are produced in Alton, 111., Florissant, Mo. and Canyon, Tex., rather than in the giant publishing houses of New York, the evidence is good that the communications gap has reached revolutionary dimensions.”

That kind of pamphleteering answers a psychological need. When a reasoned, balanced, polite discourse is refused a hearing not for one year or two but for thirty years, then one is tempted to assume that only a hyperbolic attack will gain any notice, and the total assault feels like welcome catharsis after the long period of intolerable inactivity. So the pamphleteers of ’64.