It was in this house that Wilson, after the burdens of public office, sought “some ease.” In words I quote from John Milton's “Samson Agonistes:”

One cannot speak of Woodrow Wilson fifty years after his death without recalling his last tragic days. Most poignant is Raymond Fosdick's account:

“I went down to Washington to see him…. It was less than a month before he died, and it was very obvious that his strength was failing, although his mind was keen and alert. When I said to him: ‘How are you, Mr. President,’ he quoted a remark by John Quincy Adams in answer to a similar query: ‘John Quincy Adams is all right, but the house he lives in is dilapidated, and it looks as if he would soon have to move out’…. His whole thought centered on the League of Nations, and I had never heard him speak with deeper or more moving earnestness. In his weakness the tears came easily to his eyes and sometimes rolled down his cheek, but he brushed them impatiently away. I think he had a premonition that his days were numbered - “The sands are running fast,’ he told me - and perhaps he Wanted to make his last testament clear and unmistakable. The League of Nations was a promise for a better future, he said, as well as an escape from an evil past. Constantly his mind ran back to 1914. The utter unintelligence of it all, the sheer waste of war as a method of settling anything, seemed to oppress him. ‘It never must happen again,’ he said. ‘There is a way out if only men will use it.’ His voice rose as he recalled the charge of idealism so often used against the League. ‘The world is run by ideals,’ he exclaimed. ‘Only the fool thinks otherwise.’ The League was the answer. It was the next logical step in man’s widening conception of order and law. The machinery might be changed by experience, but the core of the idea was essential. It was in line with human evolution. It was the will of God.

I would like to give attention to that portion of the American Political Science Review which is most read and least criticized, the book review section. My reading of APSR book reviews in recent years leads me to the following observations:

Most of the books selected for review adhere to the orthodox ideological values of today's political establishment. More importantly, these books almost invariably are reviewed by political scientists who share the same centrist ideological slant as the authors they are reviewing. In the reviews dealing with international relations, for instance, cold war terms like “totalitarianism”, “Castroism”, “subversion” and “Free World” are employed uncritically. Western capitalist nations are described as having “governments”, while socialist nations are said to have “regimes”, usually identified as being under the tutelage of one personage, hence: “Mao Tse-tung's regime”, and “Fidel Castro's Cuba”. The idea that popular sentiments and democratic in-puts might be part of the governance of countries like Cuba or China is not entertained.

Black America in 1970 was weary and frustrated. Old targets of its assaults on racial injustice were becoming more elusive and were changing their shapes through disguises. Demonstrations for pure civil rights causes resulted in fewer concessions. Charismatic black leaders, once able to stir the national conscience almost at will, had gone to the mountaintop. Riots had proved ruinous. Rhetoric was boring. The voices of old allies were raised in eulogy of “the movement.”

Cynicism enveloped black America like a fog, so sure were blacks that they had been placed near the bottom of the list of national priorities. For blacks knew that their aspirations remained unfulfilled, and they knew that minority participation in the affairs of the nation was still circumscribed by a variety of hostile forces. Not the least of the latter was the notion in white America that judicial pronouncements and legislation of the sixties had lifted the black man's burden; that it was time to back away from black programs and turn with some urgency to “business as usual.”

Robert Merriam, picking up where his father left off, once indicated that it would take 50 years for an aroused citizenry to root out corruption in Chicago. It has taken at least that long to upgrade Chicago's restaurants. Several decades ago, top gourmet societies labelled Chicago a “gastronomic wasteland.” Among the many old clichés and modern prejudices that the Windy City is constantly seeking to outlive is the quality of its restaurants. New Yorkers, of course, will not let old myths die. Gail Green, New York Magazine galloping gourmet, recently went away from Chicago dubbing its restaurants the “Big Potato” — homely and solid, mealy and bland. Chicago epicureans responded by a whirlwind tour of the Gotham Town's “Best and Most Delectable,” writing devastating critiques of New York's much overrated eating places. If one can transcend these diatribes and gastronomic polemics, you will find Chicago to be as good a dining town as there is in the U.S.A. — variety, service, and prices.

The Fall, 1973, PS contained a remarkable exchange. Stephen Stephens charged that Irish and Prothro's Politics of American Democracy panders to youthful radical chic proclivities, while the beseiged authors responded with dark hints that Stephens is a closet conservative. In this enlightened age, such an embarrassing, albeit stimulating and entertaining, foray is a kind of academic streaking. The time has come for this subject of textbooks to begin to be clothed with systematic empirical data.

Introductory textbooks assume a new level of dramatically increased significance because, as shrewd academic entrepreneurs have observed, “teaching political science” is clearly a growth stock. What with more and more association panels devoted to “teaching,” a special APSA committee, and the new journal Teaching Political Science, we have a wonderful ironic new subject to employ as the discipline continues to pursue what continues to count—publishing. Will the forthcoming articles on intro texts meet the rigorous standards we demand in other fields of political science or will they be of the Stephens—Irish and Prothro variety? In hopes that the former rather than the latter will prevail, herein is offered preliminary research which seeks to put the matter in a proper punctilious perspective.

In the Winter 1973 PS, a few charts and tables, and four paragraphs of dry prose were passed off as a “Report on the 1972 Annual Meeting.” Since no one who attended the meeting in Washington, D.C. would recognize the week in that report, something more descriptive seems in order.

For instance, the emphasis on program panel statistics ignores the fact that almost half of the meetings are not panels organized by the Program Committee. The Association, through its several committees, sponsored twenty-five meetings; these included the Annual Business Meeting, the Presidential Address by Robert E. Ward, reports of the year's activities of some committees, educational films, panels on political science education, and presentations of federal grant opportunities. Several groups not affiliated with APSA sponsored another some sixty-five meetings. Over twenty of these were cocktail parties. But in addition there were editorial board meetings, special-interest gatherings for political scientists specializing in federal studies, German politics, health politics, international studies, and transactionalism, to mention a few. The Caucus for a New Political Science and the Women's Caucus for Political Science continue to sponsor larger programs of panels and business meetings.

A recurring irony among political scientists is that they rarely display an interest in public policies which directly affect them. An example is the current national effort to formulate public policies for new information technologies, notably those technologies which are vital to academic research in the sciences and social sciences, such as computer-based information storage' and retrieval systems, photocopiers, and microduplication techniques. For almost two decades, lobbyists, public bureaucrats, and congressmen have been engaged in a formal and continuing attempt to revise radically the present principal expression of public policy for new information technologies, the Copyright Act of 1909.

It is my purpose in this essay to explain cursorily how the copyright concept affects the uses and users of the information technology that would seem to have the greatest utility for research in political science — the computer — and review the status of efforts to change the copyright principle in such a way as to accommodate more comprehensively the new information technologies. As we shall see, how copyright law is revised may alter traditional patterns of knowledge use and its generation in political science.

In conjunction with a discussion of the FY 1974–75 Budget at its April, 1974, meeting, the Council of the American Political Science Association instructed the Executive Director to survey the membership of the Association as to their attitudes toward the usefulness of PS in form and content. In order to take full advantage of the resources needed to conduct this survey, the National Office conceived a broader study of membership attitudes toward Association activities. The final questionnaire was approved by the Council.

On June 7, 1974, the questionnaire was mailed to 1,000 individuals selected randomly from the membership files of the Association. A second mailing was sent to those who had not responded on July 9. A total of 530 completed questionnaires were received for a response rate of 53 percent.

The demographic characteristics of the membership, as reflected in the sample, are portrayed in Table 1.

The small number of students in the sample is surprising, given the fact that a third of all Association members pay student dues. This discrepancy cannot be attributed to differential response rates; a check of our numbering system confirms the fact that “student” members returned their questionnaires at the same rate as “annual” members. Clearly, a substantial number of individuals paying student dues are employed full-time.