The Journal's Reform

The Journal's Reform

All through the '60s, the word reform bore, for many liberals at least, a talismanic quality; in reform lay progress, amelioration. Such may still be the case, but the editors of the Wall Street Journal are adopting a more jaundiced view of human affairs. In a memo to the paper's copy desk and all its bureaus, William Kreger, national news editor, has banned the word in all headlines and copy "when there is any doubt whether it applies."

The order rests on an interesting philosophical assumption, a rejection of the liberal 19th century view that any change going by the name of reform means progress. The Great Society social engineering of the '60s has obviously left many Americans with a sour sense that such is not always the case --although others may argue that the reforms simply did not go far enough. In any case, the Journal, more in the spirit of 18th century toryism, will now use such words as revision and change --a more neutral vocabulary. Oliver Goldsmith caught the spirit with his couplet in The Traveller:

How small of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

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