There was one change in the personnel of the Supreme Court during the 1958 Term. Justice Harold H. Burton of Ohio, who had been appointed by President Truman late in 1945, retired on October 13, 1958. For his place President Eisenhower selected 44-year-old Potter Stewart, a Cincinnati Republican whom he had appointed to the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1954. A graduate of Yale College and the Yale Law School (1941), Justice Stewart was given a recess appointment on October 14, 1958, but it was not confirmed by the Senate until May 5, 1959. The vote was 70 to 17, all Senators voting against confirmation being Southern Democrats. This experience underscored once more, as in the case of Justice Brennan, the risks involved in recess appointments to the Court, since Justice Stewart sat there for most of the Term before confirmation was had. Whether this affected his votes on cases is a matter of sheer speculation, but the occasion for it is highly regrettable. A new Justice should be as independent as an old one, from the very beginning his service.

Public controversy over the Court's recent decisions, particularly in the security field, continued during the 1958 Term. Pressure for legislation designed to overturn specific Court decisions or to curb the Court's powers continued in the First Session of the 86th Congress, but was less intense than in the previous Congress.

Stuart Kaufman's Modern Hatreds is a serious, original contribution on a highly policy relevant question, which is strengthened by his scrupulous case study design and deep regional expertise. Kaufman asks: when do intercommunal rivalries escalate to large-scale ethnic wars? His answer integrates a number of existing strands of explanation around the central idea that myths, or as he calls them, ethnic symbols, are the root cause of ethnic violence. His core claim is that “people make political choices based on emotion and in response to symbols” (p. 29). Ethnic wars results from the lethal combination of two particularly noxious types of myths: myths justifying the political domination of specific territory, and myths of past atrocities by others that lead to widespread fears of genocide. The realities behind these myths are far less important than that they are pervasive “in each group's mainstream history texts written before the conflict began” (p. 30).

“A treaty entering the Senate is like a bull going into the arena; no one can say just how or when the final blow will fall—but one thing is certain—it will never leave the arena alive.” When John Hay put this in his diary he had been secretary of state for six years. During this period he had seen seventeen treaties borne from the Senate, lifeless or so mutilated by amendments that they could not survive. We can pardon the harassed secretary's earlier statement. “The fact that a treaty gives to this country a great, lasting advantage, seems to weigh nothing whatever in the minds of about half the Senators. Personal interest, personal spites, and a contingent chance of petty political advantage are the only motives that cut any ice at present.”

It is, however, with the objective aspect of Secretary Hay's statement that we are primarily concerned. Statesmen, as others, may occasionally express impatience, but if the practical function of the Senate in treaty making is that of the matador at a bull fight, there are more serious grounds for concern. If its duties resemble those of picadors or banderilleros, the matter is serious enough, and of its goading tactics we have early evidence. Thus, John Quincy Adams writes in his diary: “Mr. Crawford told twice over the story of President Washington's having at an early period of his Administration gone to the Senate with a project of a treaty to be negotiated, and been present at their deliberations upon it. They debated it and proposed alterations, so that when Washington left the Senate-chamber he said he would be damned if he ever went there again. And ever since that time treaties have been negotiated by the Executive before submitting them to the consideration of the Senate.”

The meeting of the Seventy-third Congress five days after President Roosevelt's inauguration marked the twenty-fifth time in our history that a special session has been called. Critical times have been faced before and remedial measures found, but the hundred days of this session are unparalleled for the speed and discipline with which Congress was brought to face and finish its task, for the political adroitness and firmness of the presidential leadership, and for the extraordinary importance and far-reaching effects of the legislation enacted. With the substantive merits and contents of the measures passed we are not concerned here, but in this session the legislative process is as worthy of consideration as the legislative product.

Tocqueville observed, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” Moreover, he continued, “Freedom of opinion does not exist in America.” With the United States committed to a war (not to be called a crusade) against terrorism, these words from Tocqueville seem apt. If indeed the world changed on 11 September 2001, perhaps it became Manichean. Good versus evil, civilization versus barbarism, modernity versus medievalism, freedom versus fundamentalism, us versus them: These are the terms of political discourse. In the new order, you are either with the United States and the World or you are against it. Time to decide. War abhors ambiguity.

An ethical defense of the welfare state may, as Robert E. Goodin has argued, adumbrate the notion that responsibility to provide for “needy strangers” flows from the same source as family responsibility. But this view of the moral responsibility for protecting vulnerable people is open to challenge. In this Controversy, Jeffrey Obler takes issue on this point, and Goodin replies.