May 20,1936, was a date of importance in Cuban history. Not only was it the thirty-fourth anniversary of the birth of the Cuban Republic; it marked the first time in seven years (as many Cubans maintain) that a completely constitutional government had control of the island's political destinies. On May 20 of this year occurred the inauguration of Miguel Mariano Gómez y Arias, sixth “regularly elected” president of Cuba, son of the Republic's second president, and the man who, at least nominally, will be at the helm of the Cuban ship of state in the immediate future.

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).

Background of Conference Action. Forty-one countries were represented at the twenty-sixth session of the International Labor Conference, held in Philadelphia April 20–May 12, to consider the future rôle of the International Labor Organization and the economic and social policies to be recommended to the governments of member states. This was the first regular session of the Conference to be held since 1938, the New York-Washington session in 1941 having been a special one. As in 1941, there were no delegations from Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Rumania, Spain, and the U.S.S.R. Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia, Switzerland, and Turkey, which were not represented at the 1941 sesseion, were represented by government delegates and advisers, as well as Sweden, which sent a full delegation. The occupied countries of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia were represented by complete delegations; also Luxemburg by two government delegates and an adviser.

As compared with the 1941 sesssion, the twenty-sixth was held at a time more propitious to the cause of the United Nations, was better attended both as to countries represented and the number of delegates and advisers present, and was more deeply occupied with specific proposals concerning the future status of the I.L.O. and post-war economic and social problems. The reasons for this were to be found in the events of the two and a half years separating the two sessions.

In the period following World War II before the declaration of martial law in the Philippines, politics and heavy demands for patronage affected the allocation of resources, the administrative process, and personnel policies in ways inimical to the interests of businessmen and technocrats. When faced with intense competition, politicians pressed to employ growing numbers of clients and protégés in local administration. Strong political machines were better able than weak machines to ignore pressures for social services benefitting largely the lower class. The level of political mobilization and size of the lower class increased expenditures on primary education, and expenditures on intermediate and secondary education grew as the percentage of the electorate that was lower class increased. To the dismay of business interests and technocrats, “wasteful” expenditures on local administration and social services were most institutionalized and difficult to cut, while expenditures on economic improvements proved more elastic.

On March 21, 1947, the House of Representatives concurred in the Senate amendments to House Joint Resolution 27, which proposed an amendment to the Constitution of the United States placing a limit on the number of terms a President may serve. The vote in the House on so important a question was amazingly small—81 ayes, 29 noes, a total of 110 votes. Objection to the vote on the ground of absence of a quorum was made and then withdrawn. The necessary vote of two-thirds was declared to have been taken, and the way was cleared for possible ratification by the legislatures of the states.

The pertinent part of the proposed amendment in its final form is as follows:

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.”

Under this amendment a President might conceivably serve not to exceed ten years. The primary object of the latter part of the complicated proposal was to except President Truman from its application. In order to be valid, the proposal must be ratified within a period of seven years after its submission to the states.

The department where I did my graduate training in the early 1970s was bitterly split between advocates of case-study and statistical approaches. At the time, both sides thought the other would fade away—statistical analysis was a fad; case studies, a relic from a prescientific past. But 30 years later, both methods persist, and the debate has recently intensified in response to King, Keohane, and Verba's (1994) assertion in Designing Social Inquiry that the methodology of case studies could be subsumed under that used in statistical research. The polite names for the two positions have changed—“case study” versus “large N” is more common now than the “traditional” versus “scientific” monikers of the 1960s and 1970s; the epithets—“slow journalism” versus “mindless number crunching”—remain much the same.