The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal Government and Other Matters.
After World War II White became an enthusiastic editorial supporter of internationalism and the United Nations, publishing an collection of essays under the title THE WILD FLAG (1946). In the essay 'The Ring of Time' from 1956 he dealt with segregation. He tells how he explained to his cook, who was from Finland, that in the American Southland she should sit in one of the front seats - the seats in back are reserved for colored people. "Oh, I know - isn't it silly," was her reply and White concludes: "The Supreme Court said nothing about silliness, but I suspect it may play more of a role than one might suppose. People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust... Probably the first slave ship, with Negroes lying in chains on its decks, seemed commonsensical to the owners who operated it and to the planters who patronized it. But such a vessel would not be in the realm of common sense today. The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change..."
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
One Column Alone Captures The Flag,
By Don Reed "Don" (Cliffside Park NJ) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Wild Flag (Hardcover)
Wild Flag, E.B. ["Andy"] White; Houghton Mifflin Company Boston (1943-46)
EBW's abstractions about the preferable founding principles of the United Nations originally appeared at various times in The New Yorker between 1943 & 1946. Even if he was repeating himself, given the reasonable intervals, his refusal on principle alone to yield to a pervasive & fashionable cynicism about the future post-war world must have been invigorating. But when these same editorials are condensed into a "clip book" - with one dry & theoretical discourse after another running together in concentrated form - by sheer repetition alone, they become unpalatable ("I've read this four times already - enough!"). Fortunately, there's more to Wild Flag than just the above. In November 1945, White's column detailed the still-violent & absurd world events occurring after the end of the war in September (in response to a letter written by Herbert Weintraub, an overseas soldier who had asked: "How's everything going?"): "In the Netherlands, the Indonesians and the Dutch are fighting, using poisoned darts and some borrowed American equipment... "The Times, commenting editorially, maintained that the world is not ready for a government. (There is one thing about the Times; it knows what the world is ready for. The world, Weintraub, is ready for tomorrow's Times.)... "People are shopping these days...they feel driven, people do...in Buffalo, a bank is installing a drive-in window so that you can make deposits, or even withdrawals, without getting out of your car... "Napoleon once said, `I feel driven toward an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it...an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me.' "Napoleon, of course, failed to foresee that someday it would be possible for him to motor up alongside his bank & draw money without getting out of his car. There really is no vision, Weintraub." Wild Flag remains on the shelf while the pretenders continue to come up short & go.
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