SOURCE: "'The New Yorker' & Hannah Arendt," in Commentary, Vol. 36, No. 4, October, 1963, pp. 318-19.

In the following essay, Howe denounces the New Yorker's refusal to print rebuttals to Arendt's arguments in Eichmann in Jerusalem, which made its debut in the magazine as a controversial series of articles.

Some months ago, shortly after James Baldwin published in the New Yorker his now famous article about the Negroes, there appeared a mildly satiric comment upon it in the New Republic. The author of this comment elaborated upon the incongruity between Baldwin's passionate outcry and the sumptuous advertisements surrounding it. At the time I found this mildly irritating, for it seemed very much the sort of thing that highbrows—include me, too—might say without reflection, a kind of pat and automatic criticism based on a pat and automatic opposition to mass culture. After all, Baldwin had reached far more people...