If I knew how to write a television sitcom or a campaign stump speech,
I might know where to find the moral in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. The
stories told in the following pages don’t lead to the framing of a general rule
or the shaping of a sales pitch. Nor are they meant to. They are unique unto
themselves—migrant workers moving west in the 1930s during the great
Depression (United States, page 160) gathering in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes
of Wrath: “In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became
one family, the children were the children of all”; a father who still knows best,
ceremonious and stiff, attempting in Henry James’ Washington Square (New York
City, page 25) to save his daughter from her infatuation with a wastrel; Carl
Sandburg expressing his regrets (Chicago, page 92), “I wish to god I never saw
you, Mag./I wish to god the kids had never come.” What the reader has in
hand are proofs and demonstrations of family values attesting to the multitude
of reflections in the mirror of the human tragedy; they may or may not have
anything to say to the voters in Iowa.
