“I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time. But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word ‘wisdom” mentioned! Do you want to hear something funny? In almost four years of college—and this is the absolute truth—in almost four years of college, the only time I can remember ever even hearing the expression ‘wise man’ being used was in my freshman year, in Political Science! And you know how it was used? It was used in reference to some nice old poopy elder statesman who'd made a fortune in the stock market and then gone to Washington to be an advisor to President Roosevelt. Honestly, now! Four years of college, almost! I'm not saying that happens to everybody, but I just get so upset when I think about it I could die!”—Comment by Miss Franny Glass in “Zooey,” a story by J. D. Salinger in The New Yorker, May 4, 1957.

The central fact of the twentieth century for America is its involvement with the world, and for a nation bred in the psychic and geographic isolation of a uniform liberal faith this has evoked the dialectic battle of a pair of impulses: the effort to intensify “Americanism,” to retreat to the comfortable womb of ancient fetishes, and the effort to transcend it, to move out maturely into a welter of national experiences where the fetishes have lost their magic. It would be comforting if we could say that this battle has been clear cut, that it has been fought out by Good Men and Bad Men, much as the battle between “conservative” and “radical” has been fought out in the nationalist histories of the Progressive scholars. But this has not been true, if only because the issue itself has been hidden from sight and the men who have grappled with it, as in some Hegelian tale, have served purposes beyond their understanding. The struggle against the constraints of “Americanism,” that peculiar blend of liberalism and nationalism that only America has produced, has been as confused as the record of the twentieth century itself.

The appearance of the second Hoover Commission reports is an invitation to attempt to place them in the context of official and unofficial efforts over the past quarter century to give order and meaning to the study of public administration and of its leading example, our national administration. The object here is more than bibliographical, and if it seems ambitious it can hardly be more so than the Commission's own work. No previous study has been so amply financed, or has employed so many people, or has enjoyed such official and public relations support, in and out of government, as this one. What do the reports have to contribute, to knowledge and to policy about organization?

No changes in the personnel of the Supreme Court occurred during the 1955 Term.

Noteworthy among publications dealing with the Court and with constitutional law which appeared during the period under review were a first biography of James Wilson, a member of the original Court; symposia on the late Justice Roberts, the late Professor Thomas Reed Powell, and Justice Black; several interesting reappraisals of John Marshall; and additional installments of Professor Mason's important work on Justice Stone. A full scale critique of Charles Beard's interpretation of the Constitution was published, as well as a variety of writings on historical aspects of the Court, and on a wide range of problems of judicial practice and public law.