foreign relations, even while seeming to defer to Congress. Liberals inside Congress and out were among those who hailed these presidential achievements as great steps forward in the 1950s, but the verdict is no longer so clear. Erstwhile foes of the Bricker Amendment have been vociferous exponents of asserting congressional authority in the realm of foreign policy. Although future such initiatives may vary widely from the Bricker Amendment in both tone and substance, the story of the latter's failure in the 1950s may prove instructive to those on both sides of the issue.

NEW YORK: 1933-45

JAMES L. WHITEHEAD

John Albok is a name practically unknown to

Americans. An immigrant tailor from Munkacs, Hungary, where he was born in 1894, he came to this country expecting to find a "heaven on earth." Unlike so many who came to America's shores, he achieved his dream and established himself in New York City on the basis of a modest business as a tailor. This enabled him to support a family and to pursue his avocation of photography, to which he brought the personal qualities of humanitarianism and a somewhat romantic idealism.

When the Great Depression struck his adopted homeland, Albok was shocked and disappointed that so great a catastrophe could befall America. He saw the poverty of the jobless, who scavenged from the garbage cans in front of his shop and slept beneath the elevated railways or in the parks. He could not reconcile such poverty and despair with the promise of America and set about to record life as he saw it on the streets of New York. With the advent of the New Deal under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Albok discovered in New Yorkers a resurgent spirit of hope and brotherhood that transcended their hardship. With his camera he brilliantly captured their inherent

dignity, and his poignant photographs reveal the vitality and strength of a people pressed down by circumstances but able to endure with pride and faith in the future.

The accompanying portfolio is Albok's tribute to his fellow New Yorkers. It is also a belated tribute to Albok himself, who, deeply moved by the depression and inspired by Roosevelt's concern for its victims, recorded their plight with creative fidelity to the truth of those desperate times. Except for one exhibition in 1938 at the Museum of the City of New York, Albok has never received the recognition that his work deserves. Indeed, he never even opened a studio as such, preferring to work after hours in his tailoring establishment. In recognition of his unusual ability and sensitivity, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library is exhibiting a selection of his photographs taken during the Roosevelt years. Characteristically, Albok, now almost eighty and still an active tailor and photographer, looks upon these photographs as his tribute to Roosevelt, whose New Deal, he believes, rekindled hope in the lives of ordinary Americans.

Photographs 1974 by John Albok