JU 1955 ¢

Collectivism RebaptizedFrank S. Meyer

ConceIved in LibertyWilliam Henry Chamberlin

Education of King JerkEdward A. Tenney

Chrysler Windsor 4-Door Sedan

THE FORIIVARD LOOKIt's America's newest love affair

Last November, when the 1955Chrysler Corporation cars were intro­duced, it was immediately clear thatAmerica liked THE FORWARD LOOK.

Now, after six months, it is fair to sayAmerica loves THE FORWARD LOOK.People who own these cars say they'rethe finest they've ever driven.

America's motorists, long aware of themechanical excellence of Chrysler Cor­poration cars, are finding even morespecial values in THE FORWARD

LOOK than they might have expected.No cars were ever so responsive, soeffortless to drive, so sure to handle.

The full-time Power Steering affordsfar greater control and ease than part­time devices of other makes. The finestV-8 engines and 6's made provide moreefficient power. Exclusive Power Fliteprovides the best combination ofsmoothness and acceleration of anyautomatic transmission. The modernpositioning of the drive selector on the

dash makes for easier, surer operation.

Perhaps even more compelling is thebeauty of THE FORWARD LOOK-along, low, wholly contemporary stylethat suggests motion even when the caris standing still!

To inspect and to drive the cars ofTHE FORWARD LOOK is to establisha new sense of value of todai'smotor cars. THE FORWARD LOOK hascaught on. This truly is the year tochange to a Chrysler Corporation car!

CHRYSLER CORPORATIONPLYMOUTH • DODGEC6Pyright 1955 by Chrysler Corporation

• DE SOYO • CHRYSLER • IMPERIALSee Chrysler Corporation's great TV shows," Shower of Stars" and "Climax!" Thursday evenings, CBS-TV Network.

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It gives greater protection against blow­outs, too! Any tire may blowout if it isseverely cut or damaged. But naturallythe tire with the strongest cord offers thegreatest protection against cuts andbruises. 3-T Cord is so tough that breaksgrow slowly-you get a gradual, harmlessloss of air. Goodyear, Akron 16, Ohio.

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W8shington, D. C FRANK C. HANIGHEN 557

Readers Also Write........................ .. . . . . . . . . .. 544

The FRE,EMAN is published mon~hly at.Orange, ~onn., by The Irvington Press,. Inc.,Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. Copyr~ghted III the Umted ~tatc:s, 19~5, by ~he IrvlllgtonPress, Inc., Leonard E. Read, PresIdent; Fred Rogers FaIrchIld, VIce PresIdent; ClaudeRobinson, Secretary; Lawrence Fertig, Treasurer; Henry Hazlitt and Leo Wolman.Entered as second class matter at the Post Office at Orange, Conn.

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Editorials

On Stockpiling Hamburgers 546Conservatives Conserve 547The Point of Diminishing Returns 547In One y,ear 548Sucker States 549Beware of the "Summit" 549Notes on the News 549

Volume 5 of the FREEMAN will include eighteennumbers and will continue through December1955. Starting with the January 1956 issue,volumes will conform to the calendar year andinclude twelve numbers.

For the FourthSuppose the signers of the Declaration hadbeen "practical" men. Suppose they had madeKing George III a "sensible" proposition,something like this: If ~ou will call off allyour petty repressive measures, all your nastylittle taxes, and give the thirteen coloniesrepresentation in Parliament, we will allow youto tax our incomes "from whatever sourcederived." (Which is the wording of our Six­teenth Amendment.) Would His Royal High­ness have accepted? Would there have been aRevolution? An Independence Day? Would WIL­

LIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN have written his ar­ticle "Conceived in Liberty" for this issue ofthe FREEMAN?

Mr. Chamberlin is now o'll the high seas inquest of ideas. Among the countries he willvisit this summer will be Austria and Yugo­slavia. The readers of the FREEMAN can there­fore look for penetrating analyses of the courseof independence in the one country and theprogress of communism in the other.

The theme of "Collectivism Rebaptized" willbe developed into a book, at the suggestion ofa publisher. This will probably be the first timethe strategy of the collectivists-of distortingthe meaning of words that have achievedprestige-will be met head-o'n before the sab­otage of language has been accomplished. Wepredict that "conservatism" will not go the wayof such established words as liberalis,m, free­dom, democracy.... Recently, the HarvardConservative Club staged a "debate" betweenDr. Russell Kirk and Dr. Arthur Schlesinger,Jr. In the question and answer period, a studentvoiced this protest: "I came here to hear adebate betwee'n a conservative and a liberal,and all I got was an argument between aconservative liberal and a liberal liberal."

Quite properly, we look upon acts of gov­ernment as invasions of freedom. But freedom,in the final analysis, is a spiritual value,residing in the individual and completely im­pervious to political power. So long as peoplevolu'nt'arily and instinctively recognize a supra­personal and final authority, freedom is notlost; nor is it even impaired if men find wisdomin a Shakespeare rather than in a,cts of Con­gress. HOLMES ALEXANDER, a Washington news­paper correspondent, makes this point in "ToShakespeare and the Bible."

Another newcomer to our pages is GEORGE W.

PRICE, a young Chicago chemist who dabblesin psychology. "The World's Greatest Suckers,"he writes us, is his first published article.EDWARD A. TENNEY is a professor of English atIndiana State Teachers College.

GEORGE WINDER is a journalist and a farmer,residing now in Sussex, England. In NewZealand, his birthplace, he was an active free­trader, and has since contributed free trade andanti-collectivist articles to British journals.

VOL. 5, NO. 13

Libertarians

For

..4 Monthly

FRANK CHODOROVMABEL WOOD

IVAN R. BIERLY

JULY 1955

THB

EditorManaging EditorBusiness Manager

rreeman

Books

A Reviewer's Notebook JOHN CHAMBERLAIN 572Second Defense Line HUBERT MARTIN 574New Light on petain FELIX WITTMER 574Calm Optimism F. A. HARPER 575Essay ,in Confusion WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. 576From Plato to Dewey THOMAS J. SHELLY 576T. R. at Home ROBERT PHELPS 577Land of the Great Lie SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE 578Free Market Miracle HELMUT' SCHOECK 578Man Belittled REV. EDMUND A. OPITZ 579The Pasadena Story C. O. STEELE 579Well Worth Reading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 580

Articles

Conceived in Liberty WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN 550The Tale of a Shirt W. M. CURTISS 554Collectivism Rebaptized FRANK S. MEYER 559Education of King Jerk EDWARD A. TENNEY 563The World's Greatest Suckers GEORGE W. PRICE 565To Shakespeare and the Bible HOLMES ALEXANDER 567Ted Williams' Take-'Home Pay. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 563When the Government Is Boss GEORGE WINDER 570

The FREEMANSubs'cription Department

Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.CHANGE OF ADDRESS: Send old address (exactly as printed on wrapper of your80PY) and new address, with zone number, if any.

EDITORIAL AND GENERAL OFFICES: Address the FREEMAN, Irvington-on­Hudson, N.Y. The editors cannot be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts unless re­turn postage, or better, a stamped, self-addressed envelope is cmc1osed. Manuscriptsmust be typed double-spaced. Articles signed with a name or initials do not necessarilyrepresent the opinion of the editors.

Printed in U.S.A. by Wilson H. Lee Co., Orange, Conn.

Contents

THOMPSON BRINGS TV TO GI'SIN MID-OCEANFirst complete (t('Packaged Station" telecasts big-time

programs to servicemen in the Azores

Up goes the TV antenna ••• and GI'sstationed in the Azores are all set towatch programs from their own island"packaged station", as complete as yourown local station!

GI's put a local TV show on the airfrom studios of the Azores station. Costofstation installation was about one-fifththat of the usual broadcasting stationequipment-so low that the airmen paidfor it themselves through their ownwelfare funds. Design and constructionwere so simple that it was in full oper­ation less than 2 weeks after arrivalin the Azores.

Eight Hundred Miles off the coastof Portugal, the Dage Television

Division of Thompson Products hasbuilt a c()1nplete local TV station ...supplying everything but the actorsand commercials!

The development of this Hpack­aged unit" by Thompson-Dageelectronic engineers has made itpossible for servicemen stationed inremote places to enjoy popular net­work programs. Live local programsalso originate from this unit. Itincludes TV cameras, projectors,transmitters, antennae, microphones,studio monitors, as well as completelighting, testing and servicing equip­ment ... the works.

Final training of operating

You can counton

flhompsonProducts

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personnel under Thornpson super­vision is included in this package,now being duplicated at otherAmerican military outposts. All per­sonnel and equipment used in theAzores TV station were flown 3,250miles to the building site whereThompson-Dage engineers super­vised the installation.

The field of television electronicsis but one of many where Thompson

The Heart of the Thompson-Dage PackagedTV Station is this very small Dage TVCamera. It weighs about one-third as muchas the average commercial TV camera, andrequires about one-third the space. A conven­tional camera is traced behind the Dage unitfor size comparison. The Dage TV Camera isnaturally much easier to handle, allowinggreater flexibility to get "good shots" withouta costly. cumbersome carriage.

Products engineering and manu­facturing skills and facilities aredeveloping amazing new productsand improving old ones for suchwidely-diversified industries asautomotive, aviation, light metals,metallurgy, home appliances andmany others that have learned youcan count on Thompson! ThompsonProducts, Inc., General Offices,Cleveland 17, Ohio.

Another Thompson - Dage development isthis "pint. sized" TV Camera, weighing JUSt7% lbs. It is the smallest, self-contained tele­vision camera and operates on a closed circuit.It has unlimited uses in industry ... to checkdangerous operations, guard plant gates andinstruct trainees. In stores it helps spot shop­lifters, in homes it keeps an eye on nursery orsickroom, in hospitals it shows operation"close-up" to medical students.

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MARY CECIMilwaukee, Wis.

Uphill FightI haven't lost faith in America, butsometimes I think it's an uphill fight.

I'm glad to subscribe to the FREEMAN

and to pass on my copy at our school(a private school). Maybe, just maybe,there are enough Americans left whotogether can put this great country ofours back on its original standards.

Misses Humor... Ever since the management changedI have missed a great deal the oc­casiona.I flashes of humor and to'ngue­in-cheek articles . . . although I dodetect in recent issues some return tothis attitude in places.

To my mind the best article youpublished in some time w'as the one byMax Eastman on modern art (May 3,1954). It was good not only becauseit wrote lucidly and delightfully aboutthe subject, but also because it was thesort of article one could give withoutapology to one's "liberal" friends. Itis no use giving the latter an articlethat resemhles an economic tract­and I must admit that I am not tooenthusiastic about those myself....

On all counts, more power to you.I sincerely hope you can build themagazine into a real and potent voicein cultural as well as political activi­ties.Bethesda, Md. JOAN R. CLARK

In fact, federal aid means federalcontrol. American farmers are as­sured a "fair" price for their pro-,duce, but they are told by the Wash­ington bureaucrats in qualitative andquantitative terms just what crops toplant. If federal money pays forteachers, federal authority will con­trol their selection. The same appliesto books and educational facilities.

Moreover, federal aid is unneces­sary. A report prepared by a subcom­mittee of President Eisenhower's Com­mission on Intergovernmental Rela­tions includes the following statement:"We have been unable to find a statewhich cannot afford to make moremoney available to its 'schools or whichis economically unable to support a'nadequate school system." The reportwent on to assert that federal money"is not necessary."

Federa.I debt is nearly 275 billiondollars; the combined indebtedness ofall state and local governments in allforty-eight states is about 18 billion.Which is in better financial conditionto pay for a school system?

The need of our schools is great,but in our anxiety to find a sourceof funds we must not fall into thetrap of nationalizing education.Deerfield, Mass. E. WARDWELL STONE

ImmigrationAn article in the May FREEMAN asks"What would you call Mr. Hoiles?"I would eall him a friend who wouldundoubtedly profit fronl a bit of neigh­borly counsel. . . .

Mr. Hoiles believes in freedom nomore than I do, but I do not join

_ those who advocate removal of theMcCarran-Walter Immigration Act.There isa time when that restrictionon free and unlimited immigrationmight be removed, but that time isnot now whe'n A,merica is operatingunder a political philosophy which per­mits, and even dem'ands,that govern­ment reach into the pockets of thosewho display ability to support all thosecitizens who display need. Freedom inrelation to imm,igration at the presenttime would bring millions to our shoreswith their hands outstretched, andtheir numbers, ·and needs, would de­stroy what freedom still remains inAmerica....Hudson, N.Y. HOWARD L. FREEMAN

Customers Can Strike"Your Job: Where Does I t ComeFrom" (April) should be MUST read­ing for every jobholder.... Our laborleaders and pro-labor politicians shouldbegin to realize that when wages andbenefits force the cost of the producttoo high, customers go on strike.Lebanon, Pa. RUTH MONROE

Federal Aid to Education... Exponents of federal educationalsubsidy maintain that the central gov­ernment can thus serve the generalwelfare better than the individualstates. But the federal governmentgets its money from the people andspe'nds much of it for the machineryof administration, something withwhich the states are already suppliedin the case of education. If the tax­payer can support federal grants, hecan pay for state education.

Advocates of federal aid say theirpurpose is to help less prosperousstates, thus equalizing educational op­portunities for all American children.Dr. James B. Conant has gone onestep farther. He has publicly decriedthe continued existence of privateschools, on the grounds that indepen­dent institutions keep all children fromgetting the same kind of education.Perhaps these will be the strings at­tached to "equalizing" federal aid­abolition of all schools except federally­controlled indoctrination ce'nters.

Re1oder.s .a so wrIte'

?//.."IT CAN/THAPPEN HERE ..

Joe Blattner wanted to plant 24acres in wheat on his farm insoutheastern Pennsylvania.

Sound reasonable?

But Uncle Sam said no-16 acreswas enough-plant more wheatand he'd be fined, and a gov­ernment lien would be placed onhis entire wheat crop.

Still sound reasonable?

Read the entire story, "A FarmerFights fO'r Freedom," in the JuneFREEMAN. Reprints of this articleare now available. Order asupply and send copies to yourfriends and neighbors, Congress­men and Senators, teachers,ministers and thought-leaders inyour community.

544 THE FREEMAN

It seems to meby Philip M. McKenna

President, Kennametal Inc., Latrobe, Pa.

A Promise is a Promise ...or, at least, it used to bel

It wasn't so long ago that our Government kept everypromise it made. One of these was the promise toexchange gold coin for our currency when we wanted it.Then something happened that changed the course ofour country's destiny. Back in 1933, our Governmentsuspended specie payments in gold ... but only to us,u. S. citizens. Foreigners still can get gold for dollarcredits.

You might say, as I would say, "That's not theAmerican way of doing things." And the same holdstrue when the Government reneges on its promises.

It seems to me that the people who have suppliedgold to our Government should have the right to get itback at a standard rate when they want it. A GoldCoin Standard will re-establish that right. Such astandard will also re-establish a standard of measure­ment for business, for industry and for finance. Such astandard, furthermore, will make it possible to pass onsavings which industry and industrial progress provide.As one example, the savings that Kennametal* makesavailable to industry can then be passed along for the

By so doing, our Government went back on itspromise.

What a country the United States of America wouldbe if everybody went back on his word ... refused tokeep a promise once made!

Let's suppose our railroads did that. Suppose youdeposited your baggage with a railroad and received abaggage claim check. But when you returned the nextday' to claim your personal property, the railroaddeclared your claim no longer valid. If you angrilyinsisted, the clerk would explain, "Your baggage checkis void. We declared this morning that all claims onbaggage checked here were no longer valid ... that is,except claims by citizens of foreign countries."

benefit of consumers in the form of lower prices andhigher purchasing power.

The re-establishment of a Gold ,Coin Standard isworth more than a passing thought. It's worth deepconsideration and much discussion ... with yourfriends, neighbors and others, not excluding publicofficials and candidates for office. You can discuss itwith me, too, if you care to write to me. I'll also beglad to talk with you about Kennametal and its placein America's future progress. KENNAMETAL INC.,Latrobe, Pennsylvania.*Kennametal is the registered trademark of a series of hard carbide alloysof tungsten, tungsten-titanium and tantalum, for tooling in the metal­working, mining and woodworking industries and for wear parts in machinesand process equipment used in practically every industry.

One of a series of advertisements in the public interest. 7256

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THE

rreemanJULY 1955

On Stockpiling Hamburgers

IT WAS all so excruciatingly funny. some.bodydug up from a Hoover Commission reportthe statistic that the Navy had stockpiled

enough canned hamburgers to supply its estimatedneeds for sixty years. The newspaper witsgrabbed on the item and worked it over. A filipwas added by the subsequent discovery that theNavy had taken similar forethought in the matterof the necessary condiment, catsup, at the rate ofone gallon for each pound of hamburger in thelarder.

If that kind of "news" makes good copy, theeditors would do well to assign a research workerto any department of government; he would comeup with plenty of laughs. He would learn, for in­stance, that one department had a century's sup­ply of paper clips on hand, that another had awarehouse full of carbon paper. The history ofthe United States Post Office would furnish thegag writers with material enough for a full edi­tion of .any newspaper.

The real laugh is on the editors themselves.For the editions that told the hamburger storyalso ran serious editorials on the government'smishandling of the polio vaccine. It did not occurto the pundits that if the government could notrun a hamburger stand efficiently, it certainlycould not be trusted with so big an undertakingas medicine. The expectation of bureaucratic effi­ciency in any field is really funny, if one's senseof. humor goes that far. For efficiency in govern­ment is in itself incongruous.

Efficiency is a standard of performance. It isarrived at by comparison only. Thus, the clippership was the most efficient thing on the high seasuntil the steamship came along; and an efficientworker is one who, compared with the perform­ance of other workers, achieves the desired resultwith less effort, more expeditiously, more neatly.

Where the performer has no competition, effi­ciency is a meaningless term. He sets his stand­ard of performance to suit his own convenience.That is the purpose of monopoly. The monopolist,having control of supply, fixes his output by the

546 THE FREEMAN

star of his net profit; if he increases his outpu the will dispose of it only by lowering his price,and that may not render him the same net. If heraises his price, his sales may drop to a pointwhere his net will be reduced. His profit and lossstatement is the measure of his performance.

A private monopoly, however, is never com­pletely free of competition. There is always thepossibility of buyers turning to a substitute, aswhen the high price of coffee made many teadrinkers. Then there is the constant threat oftechnological competition; the railroad wasforced off its high perch by the advent of air andmotor transportation. For such reasons, the pri­vate monopolist is under some pressure to keepa weather eye on his efficiency.

But a government is monopolistic in composi­tion-you cannot have two governments in th~

same area-and all its operations are free ofcompetition. It begins with a monopoly of coer­cion, which it extends to any operation it maytake under its wing. It cannot work otherwise. Inthe early days of the Post Office Departmentthere was some competition in the business, andsinee the government could not meet the stand­ard set by the private operators it outlawed them.Right now there is ado about the comparative effi­ciency of private power plants and those run bythe government; when the government forces pri­vate plants out of the field, as it must if it con­tinues to operate its own, the question of efficiencywill be purely academic. The consumers musttake whatever service the government offers (youcannot take your mail to a competing post office),and pay for it with compulsory taxes.

Why, then, talk about efficiency in government?There is no basis for comparison, which efficiencyimplies. It is interesting to note that the commis­sars of the U.S.S.R. speak of the efficiency oftheir socialistic enterprises in terms of compara­tive performances in countries where competitionobtains. How else would they be able to set stand­ards for themselves?

And we, on our part, criticize the post officeonly because we can compare its socialistic serv­ice with that of the private telephone or tele­graph companies. But, if our government becamethe complete monopolist, as it is in the U.S.S.R.,any judgment of its performance would be sus­pended in mid-air. In fact, we would not see thehumor in the stockpiling of hamburgers, for thatkind of thing would be the regular order-as itis now in every department of government.

Addendum:

A few day.s after the hamburger story appeared inthe newspapers, thie New York Times reported that"the Army has been unable to find suppliers ofall the beef it want.s in the future." Apparently,the efficient Navy had raided the market.

Conservatives Conserve

THE VICTORY of the Conservative Party in therecent British elections has encouraged hopes

similar to those that were entertained in thiRcountry when Eisenhower was elected in 1952.Perhaps, after all, the trend toward socialism hasbeen stopped. Perhaps public opinion has turnedfrom big government and toward freedom. Per­haps the lesson of the ages has been relearned,that the good society is one in which the inherentrights of the individual are respected, and thathenceforth the mass mind will cease to seek hea­ven on earth by way of political legerdemain.

It is good to hope, but it is better to face therealities, so as to avoid the despondency that fol­lows from frustrated expectations. The exuber­ance of anticipation which, in certain circles,sprang from the Republican victory has in twoyears subsided into dull disappointment; we stillhave with us the same high taxes, the same politi­cal profligacy, the same interventions in our pri­vate lives that characterized the regime to whichthe GOP succeeded. In short, the trend towardsocialism has not been stopped and certainly hasnot been reversed; the best that can be said isthat its velocity has been somewhat retarded.

What reason is there to expect a different re­sult from the return of the Conservative Partyto power? In the pre-election campaign its oratorsdid not even promise an abolition of the interven­tionist measures which the party had inheritedfrom the avowed Socialists. Why? Simply becauRcany intimation of an intention to free the Britisbfrom their fetters would have cost them the elec­tion. Years of inurement to paternalis'm haverobbed the British of that sense of spiritual self­reliance that is the keystone of freedom.

So the Conservative Party can be depended up­on to conserve what they found: socialism. Rutthat has been its historic role-to conserve the

status quo. It has always opposed change. In thenineteenth century, the Conservatives bitterlyfought any modification of the protectionist sys­tem even in the face of a national famine; theyupheld an .antiquated election system; they sup­ported the prerogatives of the House of Lords,and in general challenged change. The only policythe Conservatives ever had was to hold on toWhatever is-and in holding on to the going so­cialistic order, they are acting in character.

In this country there is a nascent movementamong Socialists-that is, New Dealers and self­styled liberals-to appropriate the Conservativelabel. (See "Collectivism RebaptIzed," by FrankMeyer, page 559 of this issue). There is somelogic in their claim to the name. Socialism beingthe order of the day, both in mass thought and inpublic affairs, those who aim to keep it going arein fact Conservatives. The libertarians, those whowould kick socialism out of our lives, are reallythe radicals.

The libertarians like to describe themselves asconservatives because they aim to conserve cer­tain values. But even in this they are radicals,for the values they seek to conserve are rootedin basic principles, and a radical is one who al­ways goes to the root of things. It is the functionof radicals, like the Hebrew Prophets, to stressthe eternal verities as against makeshift devices,and to warn the mass mind of the consequencesof trying to circumvent natural law. No politicalparty is equipped for that job.

The Point 0/Diminishing ReturnsSUPPOSE YOU were the Ford representative in the

recent negotiations with the union. What wouldyour guiding star be? Would not the immediatecircumstances, rather than a consideration of long­term effects, det.ermine your judgment?

Among these circumstances, the fact that yourcompany has a backlog of orders would 100m big.If the Ford plant is closed by the promised strike,the orders will be cancelled, and more than theloss of profits on the unconsummated sales is in­volved.

First there is the loss of capital. Maintenanceof a nonoperating plant is costly. The managerialstaff which was built up at great expense over aperiod of time, and which cannot be replaced ata moment's notice, must be retained against thetime when operations will be resumed; that is anoutlay which cannot be recouped. Also, there isthe matter of contractual advertising obligations;this, too, will become a lost investment in theevent of a strike.

JULY 1955 547

Perhaps an even greater consideration in yourmind is the possibility of permanent loss of trade.For strategic reasons, the union leaders will notcall a strike on your ,competitors while your plantis shut down. The public, in need of car.s, willturn to these other makes, find out that there isnot much difference betwe'en them and Ford cars,and, having formed the habit, will continue topatronize your competitors. Ford will have lostthat valuable intangible called "good will."

All in all, you cannot afford a strike-and theunion leaders are counting on that fact. So youconsider their demands. As an economist, you mayrealize that in the long run these are impossible.For instance, you know that wages come from pro­duction-nowher,e else-and that the union's de­mand that workers be paid when they are notproducing is sheer lunacy. What they are demand­ing lis that you set aside a fund, ,taken from currentproduction, to be distributed among workers whenthey are not producing.

But where is this fund to come from? From thecars currently sold and paid for. That means thatthe price of these cars must be increased, and theonly question in your mind is, will the car-buyingpublic (which includes wage earners in the Fordplant) absorb the increase? You are concerned withwhat economists call the "point of diminilShing re­turns."

It has happened that unioneers have pushed theirdemands beyond this "point of diminishing re­turns." Five years ago, the New York Sun,aftera century of continuous operation, sold out to theNew York World-Telegram. On the front page ofits very last edition, the Sun ran an editorial,signed by its publisher, saying that the demandsof the union had forced it to discontinue. It wasno longer possible, the editori.al asserted, for anewspaper to operate in New York with only 30,000circulation; advertisers will not pay more forspace, and readers will not pay more than a nickelper copy. But the main cost of production, labor,had be,en pushed beyond the point where revenuewould meet costs.

When the Sunw:ent out of existence, the numberof jobs ,available for newspapermen in New Yorkdiminished. You cannot have ,two city editors onone newspaper, and two reporters of a bas:eballgame is one too many; and what can a newspaperdo with an extra mechanical staff? The "point ofdiminishing returns" had been reached, and a num­ber of workers were out of jobs. They had to lookfor wages in some other field.

Incidentally, the World-Telegram itself was aconsolidation of three other papers, two of whichhad gone out of existence: the Telegram and amorning edition of the New York World. And, cometo think of i,t, when New York had half the popula­tion and newspapers sold at one cent each, therew,ere at least twice the number of newspaper.s thatnow appear on the stands. 'The "point of diminish-

548 THE FREEMAN

iug returns" interred many of the missing mast­heads. The last casualty came this year, when theBrooklyn Eagle, also a hundred years old, died ina strike. What happened to all those fine news­papermen, and their wages?

And so, as negotiator for the Ford plant, youweigh the demands of the unioneers against the"point of diminishing returns" in the automobilebusiness. What is it? Time will tell.

In One Year

I T'S TIME to take stock. A year ago this monththe FREEMAN, a for1tnightly, was acquired by

the Irvington Press, Inc., turned into a monthly,and I was invited to be the editor. The customarything to do in the circumstances is to present aprogress report.

Statistically, for what it is worth, we can painta pleasant picture. The circulation of the FREEMAN,

though still slightly below the mark we had set forthe first year, is 65 per cent above what we inher­ited. This may be due to our promotional efforts,but a good part of the increase can be credited tothe efforts of our readers to interest their friendsin the publication. This cooperation, for which weare deeply grateful, indicates that we have madeprogress editorially. This needs sorn,e explanation.

A journal of opinion is preeminently a readers'publication. Its prim;e purpos.e is to give expres­sion, in a general way, to a philosophy of publicaffairs to which they hold. Though the readers ofthe FREEMAN may not always agree with the positiontaken by a writer, or the editor, on some specificissue, it is not to be expected that they would readthe publication unless they aceepted its basic prem­ises: that a government of narrowly limited powersis best for society, that a free,economy furthersman's pursuit of happiness. A Socialist would findthe FREEMAN quite uninteresting, if not revolting.

If this should be interpreted as a policy of"talking to ourselves," our answer would be thatthere is no known way of .converting a confirmedcollectivist to libertarianism. The best that logicand precept can do is to catch the undecided andto help thos'e who confess their confusion; and, iftruth were known, we can catch them only if theyhad a natural inclination toward freedom in thefirst place. At any rate, the "ourselves" for whomthe FREEMAN is published is a much larger hostthan our present readership; we estimate that atleast 100,000 Americans would welcome the publica­tion if they knew about it.T,elling them about it isa job in which our readers can be of great help.

Finally, a personal note. I am grateful to thenecessarily underpaid contributors who have madethe FREEMAN what it is. May they continue to writebetter and better articles, that I may shine in theirreflected glory.

Sucker States

WHEN THE Sixteenth (income-tax) Amendmentwas ratified by the state governments, the

compelling idea was that the "rich" states shouldsupport the "poor" ones. In the early years of in­come taxation, 41 states got back in grants-in-aidmore than they paid in to the federal government;there were only seven sucker states. In due timethe federal "take" was increased, so that now theonly "poor" state is the District of Columbia; allthe rest contribute more to its upkeep than theyget back.

In 1954, the gross Internal Revenue collectionscame to more than $70 billion; of this, a little morethan $4 billion-or about six cents on the dollar­was returned to the states, including checks toindividuals.

A movement for the secession of the 48 statesfrom Washington would be in order.

Beware of the ''Summit''

ONE THOUGHT suggests another; as when a newromanUc novel brought to mind an entirely

different kind of book I had read thirty yearsbefore.

The novel- The Twelve Pictures!, by EdithSimon-is a new twist of the Nibelungen story,with some of the mythology taken out, of Siegfriedand Brunhilde and Kriemhilde and Hagen the One­Eyed, and has nothing to do wi.th political science;just a well-told tale. But somehow as I was read­ing it I thought of How Diplomats Make War2, byFrancis Neilson, which was published after he hadresigned his seat in Parliament when World WarOne broke out.

The title of the Neilson book is quite descriptiveof its thesis; that the war was actually framed,in the colloquial sense, in the capitals of Europe,where meetings held for the advertised purposeof "preserving the peace" resulted in understand­ings that led to, and apparently were intended tolead to, armed conflict. In The Twelve Pictures,likewise, the climax is a mass murder that resultsfrom a goodwill meeting of kings; antecedentthereto is a sequence of intrigue and double-cross­ing, all in the diplomatic manner of the times.

The main difference between fifth-century andtwentieth-century Big meetings is in protocol; thelatter-day "summit" gatherings are far more devi­ous, far more long-winded and far more impersonalin setting up the conditions of conflict. In ancienttimes, too, kings did not rule out the possibilityof doing a little dying on their own account; they

1. New York: G. P. Pt1tnam~s Sons. $3.952. New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. $1.00

did not leave it all to their subjects; they evenrisked their personal fortunes on the gamble forpower.

The two books, one an historical novel, the otheran historical record, underline the fact that warsare made at the "summit," and that the popularexpectation that the condi.tions of peace can resultfrom such meetings is fatuous. Take the presentinternational strains which, it is hoped, the pro­posed Big Four meeting will ameliorate; are theynot the consequence of other Big meetings at Te­heran, Yalta and Potsdam? Were we not inveigledinto war at the melodramaticOhurchill-RooseveHmeeting in mid-Atlantic? Is it not a recognizedfact that the prelude to World War Two was theVersailles Peace Conference? We have no precedentfor the assumption that the dove of peace will behatched at the "summit" sittings in prospect.

We need not go behind the historical returnsto prove that such an assumption is unwarranted;to do so would involve us in a discussion of theinadequacy of political power in the arts of peace,and to show thaf built into government is a pro­pulsion toward war. That's another subject. It isenough to point out here that you and I could notframe a war even if we wanted to; besides, wehaven't time for such peccadillos because we aretoo busy pursuing happiness, which is the businessof peace. Wars are always made at the "summit."

Notes on the NewsCentralized Education: There seem to be as manyways for the federal government to wangle itsway into control of education as there are forskinning a cat. The current Congress has beforeit eighteen bills aimed to provide "aid." Theyrange all the way from giving post-high schoolscholarships to grants for the study of foreignlanguages.

* * *He Who Pays the Piper: The City of Yonkers hasbeen warned by the New York State EducationCommissioner that unless it "improves" its publicsehool system, it will los'e its state grants toeducation. Beggars cannot be choosers.

* * *"Confession" of the Dead: When Krushchev camea-wooing to Belgrade, he began his courtship incharacteristic Soviet fashion, with a "confessionof guilt." The "crime" of disrupting communisticsolidarity, he said, had not been committed byTito, as the Kremlin had asserted in 1948, but bythe traitor Beria. It was a "confession" inabsentia.

* * *No Time for Anything Else: In a republic, thefirst job of a politician is to get elected; thesecond is to get re-elected.

JULY 1955 549

Conceived •In Liberty

By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN

One hundred and seventy-nine years ago, a shortspan in the life of a nation, the representatives ofthe Am'erican people, in arms against the BritishCrown,proclaimed on a new continent a new philos­ophy of government. After the end of the militarystruggle for independence this philosophy was setforth in detail, and with rare insight and erudi­tion in the Federalist Papers and finally embodiedin the Constitution of the United States.

The Fourth of July could well bean occasion forgetting a firm grasp on the principles on whichthe American Republic was founded. Our educa­t,ional institutions have not coped adequately withthe task of communicating these principles to stu­dents. I know from personal experience that it ispossible to go through a first-rate preparatoryschool and an ,excellent college without being im­pressed by the sheer thrill of political and intellec­tual adventure associated with the launching ofthe United States as an independent nation.

For it was an adventure, about which there weremany prophets of gloom and doom on the other sideof the Atlantic and som,e in the newly emancipatedcolonies themselves. Here were thirteen sparselypopulated states, more distant from leach other interms of travel and communication than New Yorknow is from London or Tokyo, starting out as anew nation without institutions whioh most Euro­peans then regarded as essential to stability­without a monarchy, an hereditary aristocracy oran ,established national church.

It was easy to imagine a relapse into anarchy,followed by the emergence of a "strong man" asdictator. But apart from the tragic schism of theCivil War (and slavery and the riwht of a stateto sec,ede from the Union were two issues whichthe Constitution left unsolved), the United Stateshas enjoyed almost two centuries of ordered free­dom, unmarred by plots, internal sedition and suc­cessful or unsuccessful coups d'etat.

The ideal of self-government, first proclaimedfor the three million Americans of 1776, scatteredalong the Atlantic fring,e of the country, still worksfor 160 million Americans who have filled up avast country. The debt which Americans today oweto the men who framed the institutions of theyoung R,epublic, to Washington and Jefferson, Ham­ilton and Madison, Adams and Jay, is beyond esti­mation. These men sometimes differed among them­selves; but when they differed, it was usually be-

550 THE FREEMAN

There could be no better Fourth of July

reading than the Federalist Papers and

de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

caus,e they emphasized two aspects of a singlepolitical truth. The product of their collective wis­dom, the United States Constitution, is a mech­anism of extraordinarily delicate balance. So faras human wisdom could foresee dang,ers and pro­vide safeguards, the individual is secured againstoppression by the central government, the statesar,e left in possession of all the functions whichare not clearly the proper concern of the federalgovernment, and the powers and limitations of thethree branches of the federal government are sodefined that no one of these branches can dominatethe others and become all-powerful.

The Founding Fathers' Forethought

No form of government devised in history wasso careful to avoid the dangers of concentratedpower and so favorable to letting the citizen goas far and as fast as his individual capacity wouldcarry him, without State coddling, State regula­tion and State domination, which always go handin hand. The Founding Fathers were mindful ofthe admoni.tion voiced by one of the strongest andclearest political thinkers of the Revolution, JohnAdams:

"The institutions now made in America will notwholly wear out for thousands of years. It is ofthe last importance, then, that they should beginright. If they set out wrong, they will never beable to return, unless it be by accident, to theright path."

Adams and Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton andmany of. their colleagues were men of exceptionallearning. They were steeped in the Greek andLatin classics, in the history of medieval and mod­ern Europe, in British and French constitutionaltheory and practice. At. the same time they werenot cloistered scholars, but men of action, whoplayed leading roles in ov,erturning an old form ofgovernment and setting up a new one. As a re­suIt of this double capacity, they possessed a pan­oramic view of the rise and fall of States in thepast combined with a clear, intimate knowledge ofthe special 'conditions of America.

A coherent body of ideas figures prominently inthe philosophy of the founders of the AmericanRepublic and may be studied to advantage in theFederalist Papers. These ideas, incidentally, arenot only of trem,endous historical importance, but

are of the utmost reality and vitality in our owntime. For the noble ideal of liberty, the word mostoften used in the literature of the American Revo­lution, has been horribly perverted by fanatics andcynically misused by tyrants.

It was not only in Jacobi'll France that manycrimes, as Madame Roland 'cried on the scaffold,were committed in the name of liberty. As Profes­sor J. L. Talmon brings out in his e'rudite andsMmulating book, The Rise of Totalitarian Democ­racy (Beacon Press) the ideological origins ofSoviet communism are not entirely in the writingsof Marx and Engels. Robespierre and the FrenchJacobins, nourished on Rousseau and some of thel,ess known collectivist thinkers of the eighteenthcentury, worked out a conception of a virtuouselite that was morally ,entitled to persuade thepeople-with the aid of the guillotine, and forthe people's own good, of course-to hold andexpress unanimous opinions which would coincidewith those of the virtuous elite. This was theModelT version of modern communism, and fas­cism borrowed something in theory and a gooddeal in practice from communism.

Against all utopian conceptions, such as Rous­seau's "general will," which would lead to an abso­lute concentration of governmental power, theFounding Fathers set their faces liroe flint. Fromstudy and personal experience they knew what lib­erty was and what it was not. They knew that amob or political party operating without oppositioncould be just as cruel, just ,as destructive of free­dom as an absolute monarch or a military dictator.One of the clearest and profoundest statementsof this deep distrust of concentrated State poweris that of Madison in Number 47 of The Federalist:

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative,executive and judiciary, in the sam,e hands, whetherof one, a few or many, and whether hereditary,self-appointed or elective, may justly he pronouncedthe very definition of tyranny."

Safeguards against Big Government

Far from deifying the State, the Founding Fa­thers regarded government as a necessary but dan­gerous instrument, which required many safe­guards against abuse. Although they were ac­customed, especially in N,ew England, to the grass­roots local democracy of the town meeting, theydrew a careful distinction between the te'rms de­mocracy and republic. Madison states the distinc­tion in N'umber 14 of The Federalist:

"In a democracy the people meet and exercisethe government in person; in a republic they as­semble and administer it by their repre'Sentativesand agents. A democracy, consequently, will beconfined to a small spot. A republic may be ex­tended over a large region."

It is evident from the tone of The Federalistand other political writings of the time that the

Founding Fathers were not devotees of unlimitedmajori.ty rule or of overstrong government. Theyrecognized that minorities and individuals haverights, such as life, liberty and property, whichno majority may lawfully take away. It is signif­icant that the Constitution devotes at least asmuch attention to telling the governm,ent what itmay not do as to telling it what it may do, and it.sprohibitions are expressed in plain, unambiguous,uncompromising language:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an ·estatJ­lishm'ent of religion or prohibiting the free exer­cise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,or of the press."

It is worthwhile to contrast these simple flatassurances with the long-winded resolutions of theUnited Nations on these subjects, full of eseapeclauses, weasel words and loopholes for evasion.

The Declaration of Independence takes its standon "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God"; andbelief in natural law and inalienable rights whichmen posse'Ss independently of government andwhich no government may lawfully deny, withholdor abridge is one of the 'Cornerstones of Americanliberty.

In the literature of the American Revolutionthere is no demagogic att,empt to set human rightsagainst proper,ty rights. In the Federalist Papersand in other publications it is recognized that theright to acquire and own property is a basic andvery important human right. As John Adamswrote: "The moment the idea is admitted into so­ciety that property is not as sacred as the laws ofGod, and that there is not a force of law and publicjustiee to protect it, anarchy and tyranny com..mence."

Here, then, are the foundations of the free so··ciety of the American Republic: belief in naturallaw and inherent, inalienable human rights, intensedistrust of any concentration of power in govern­ment. a suspicious attitude toward tyranny, wheth­er of monareh or mob, including tyranny of themajority. Insofar as these foundations have beenrespected, America has prospered ·and grown great.It is where they have been most eroded and whit­tled away that some of the clearest danger signalsin our national life are flying.

The Young French Visitor

Some of ,these danger signals were clear as earlyas the 1830s to the most profound and clear-sightedobserver of the young American Republic, Alexisde Tocqueville. His work, Democracy in America, isa double masterpiece. It is a most penetratingstudy of the United States, its political institu­tions, its psychologieal traits, at the time of An­drew Jackson's Presidency, andcont-ains somestrikingly aecurate predictions of ,the Americanfuture. It is also a most searching study of thepositive and negative sides of the leveling democ-

JULY 1955 551

racy which was beginning to prevail in the Westernworld. And it is written in a style that is alwayslucid and readable and often strikingly brilliant.For understanding the main political and psycho­logical currents in the American history, de Tocque­ville's work is, a worthy companion of the cogent,close-knit reasoning of the Federalist Papers.

As an observer of American life, de Tocquevillesteers a middle course between sentimental gushand the squeamish repulsion which some cultivatedEuropeans like Mrs. Trollope f,elt for the free-and­easy frontier manners, with the copious expectora­tions of tobacco juice and the habit of calling alland sundry colonel or captain. He notes the self­reliant individualism of the American character:

"The citizen of the Uni.ted States is taught fromhis earliest infancy to r,ely upon his own exertionsin order to re'sist the evils and the difficulties oflife; he looks upon social authority with an eyeof mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims itsassistance when he is quite unable to shift with­out it."

Praised Local Initiative

As' an authentic nineteenth-century liberal, deTocqueville approves this tendency; he notes thatthe sum of private undertakings far exceeds allthat the government could have done. He notesthat there is no such thing as an American peasantand that although education is ,spre'ad thinly, thereare no pools of total illiteracy and stagnation.Again and again he praises the vitality of local ini­tiative which builds excellent schools and churchesand keeps the roads in good repair without anymeddling interference from a centralized bureau­cracy. And he pays to America of that time twocompliments which are more impressive becausehe does not spare criticism on other points:

"The European generally submits to a publicofficer because he represents a superior force, butto an American he represents a right. In Americait may be said that no one renders obedience toman, but to justic1e and to law...

"All commodities and ideas circulate throughoutthe Union as fre·ely as in a country inhabited byone people. Nothing checks the spirit of enterprise. . . The Union is as happy and free as a smallpeople, and as glorious and strong as a greatnation."

De Tocqueville is not blind to the fact thatAmericans possess the defects of their virtues.He notes a considerable downgrading of intelli­genc,e in high places since the formative years ofthe Republic. There is a memorable picture of therestless materialism which causes Americans topursue illusions to the end of their days:

"A native of the United States clings to thisworld's goods as if he were certain never to die;and he is so hasty in grasping at all within hisreach that one would suppose he was constantly

552 THE FREEMAN

De Tocqueville in America

afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them.He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, butsoon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifica­tions. . . Death at length overtakes him, but it isbefore he is weary of his bootless chase of thatcomplete felicity which is forever on the wing."

A sourc,e of fascination in de Tocqueville is hisrare gift of accurate prediction. Some of his ob­servations fit America, and the world, in the middleof the twentieth century ,even better than theconditions of his own time. There was no incometax in the America which de Tocqueville visited;but he foresaw the shape of things to come:

"Universal suffrag1e invests the poor with thegovernm·ent of society... Wherever the poor directpublic affairs and dispose of the natural resourcesit appears certain that, as they profit by the ex­penditure of the State, they are apt to augmentthat· expenditure. . . I have no hesitation in pre­dicting that, if the people of the United Statesis ever involved in serious difficulties, its taxationwill speedily be increased to the rate of that whichprevails in the greater part of the aristocraciesand monarchies of Europe."

There is the famous and remarkable forecast ofthe era of the American-Russian cold war:

"There are, at the present time, two great na­tions in the world which seem to tend toward thesame end, although they started from differentpoints: I allude to the Russians and the .l\mericans... All other nations seem to have nearly reached

their natural limits... but these are still in the actof growth... The Anglo-American relies upon per­sonal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives fre·escope to the unguided exertions and common senseof the citizens; the Russian eenters all the author­ity of society in the single arm; the principalinstrument o£ the former is freedom; of the latterservitude. Their starting point is different andthe'ir courses are not the same; yet each of themseems marked out by the will of heaven to swaythe destinies of half the globe."

De Tocqueville was alarmed not by "excessiveliberty" in the United States, but by inadequatesecurities against tyranny. For, like other nine-

·:t'e'enth-century libertarians who were democratsonly with reservations-like Burckhardt, Acton,Mill-he realized that there was danger in thetyranny of the major1ity and ,sensed that the dykes,vhich the framers of the Constitution had erectedagains·t this kind of tyranny wer,e being weakenedby the upsurge of democracy in the raw.

He realized that the day of the absolute heredi­tary monarch and of the privilegled aristocrat wasgone; but he saw new perils to liberty on thehorizon of the future. With remarkable perspicac­ity he foresaw two developments which became re­alities in the twentieth century: the totalitariansociety of communism and facism and the paternal­istic Welfare State. Regarding the former, henoted the likelihood that "those hideous eras ofRoman oppression, when the manners of .the peoplewere corrupted, their traditions obliterated, their

Thomas Jefferson Said:

habits destroyed, their opInIons shaken and free­dom, expelled from the laws, could find no refugein the land," might recur. Certainly the crimes ofa Stalin, a Hitler, a Mao Tse-tung, far exceed any­thing that could be laid to the charge of a legiti­mate ruler in the era of royal absolutism.

Still more vivid and eloquent is de Tocqueville'simaginary sketch of a paternalistic State whichwould not practice the bloody oppression of dicta­tors, but would reduce each nation "to nothing bet­ter than a flock of timid and industrious animals,of which the government is the shepherd," thatwould undertake "to spare its subjects all the careof thinking and all the trouble of living."

The American Republic was, in the wingedphrase of Lincoln, coneeived in liberty. But libertyis one of the most complex, as it is one of the mostprecious, of human conceptions. It flourishes bestin the kind of equilibrium between gov,ernmentand citizen, individual and society, majority andminority which the Founding Fathers wrote intothe Constitution. The dangers ,to true liberty varyfrom gleneration to generation; but it can neverbe maintained without constant struggle. Thereis no surer guide to the principles of politicalliberty than the Federalist Papers; no more pene­trating and imaginative study of the forces thatmay wreck or sap liberty than de Tocqueville'sgreat classic.

There could be no better Fourth of July readingthan some of the outstanding passages in boththese works.

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one an­other, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits ofindustry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the breadit has earned--this is the sum of good government.

Writings, Vol. 3, p. 320

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, underthe pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.

Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1802

I like a little rebellion now and then.... The spirit of resistance to governmentis so valuable that I wish it always to be kept ;alive. It will often be exercisedwhen wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.

Letter to Mrs. John Adams, 1787

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we shouldsoon want bread. Papers, Vol. 1, p. 66

JULY 1955 553

The Tale of a Shirt

By W. M. CURTISSWhen you pay three dollars for a cotton shirt,

only 48 cents 0 I it goes for materials, tools,

land, risk-taking. All the rest goes lor labor.

This is the story of a shirt. Joe Evans, the pro­prietor of a clothing store in Middlet.own, U.S.A.,has it; John Jones, a towns~man, wants it.

"Good morning, Mr. Jones.""Hello, Joe. What have you got in shirts?""What kind did you have in mind?""Oh, something to wear around~nothing ex­

pensive.""Here's something that ,might be just what you're

looking for.""That looks O.K. How mucn is it, Joe?1I"This one's $3.00, Mr. Jones.""That's pretty steep, isn't it?""Well, shirts have gone up like everything else.

We sold this same shirt before the war for $1.25.""It looks to me like someone must be making a

terrific profit in the shirt business. After all, Joe,you know there isn"t much cotton goes into a shirt.And as I get the story, the farmer doesn't getanywhere near $3.00 for the .cotton in that shirt."

"You're right, Mr. Jones. I think youmjght beinterested in a story I picked up the other dayfrom a little booklet one of our shirt manufacturerssent us. It gave a breakdown of all the costs thatmake up the price of a $3.00 shirt."

"Can you believe the figures? Maybe the manu­facturer was just trying to justify the high pric'eshe was charging."

"They are all government figures. Now thefarmer, Andy Johnson, has a little cotton farm inTexas. He owns his farm, which includes a housefor his family, a barn and a shed for his machin­ery. He also has a couple of tenant houses for thefolks who help him take care of his cotton.

"In the spring he has to get his land ready;then he plants the .cotton, and during the summerhe has to cultivate it to keep down the weeds. Whenharvest time comes, he and his family and all thehired help turn out to pick the cotton by hand."

"O.K., Joe, but it didn't take much of that cottonfor this $3.00 shirt. How ,much of the $3.00 didAndy Johnson get?"

"Actually Mr. Jones, Johnson got 22.5 cents forthe cotton that went into the shirt. N'ow you cansee that most of the 22.5 cents was for labor-hisown, labor of his family and his hired help. Thefigures showed that 16.8 cents of the 22.5 cents hegot was for labor; the rest, 5.7 cents, 'was for theuse of his land and buildin~ and his equipment.You might say that the 5.7 cents was pay for the

554 THE FREEMAN

capital he had invested in his business. Of course,cotton farming, like most other kinds of farming,is a risky business. There's always the chance ofpoor weather and a crop failure. Then there's therisk that when Johnson gets his crop ready tomarket, the price of cotton may have dropped andhe will have to sell at a loss. I suppose you mightfigure that part of that 5.7 cents is pay forthe risk he takes. In good years he may make alittle extra to offset the bad ones."

"Well, Joe, that 22.5 cents looks reasonableenough and it's easy to see that most of it is forlabor. But you're still a long way from the $3.00that I am asked to pay for the shirt."

"Let's follow this cotton along."

Through the Cotton Gin

"The next fellow to handle the cotton wasWalter Brown. Walter operates a cotton gin. Hetakes the cotton as it 'comes from the farmer andcleans it. Then he puts it through the gin whichseparates the cotton seed from the cotton fibersand then packs the fibers into bales of about 500pounds each."

"How much of the $3.00 does Brown get for hisjob of ginning?"

"He gets 2.1 cents, but of course he's set upto handle a lot of cotton, and it doesn't cost muchto handle the small amount required for a shirt.Again most of the 2.1 cents goes to the laborwhich Walter Brown supplies, and a 'little is payfor the use of his machinery, equipment, andbuildings."

"What happens to it after the ginner getsthrough with it, Joe?"

"The next step takes the cotton from the ginnerto the mills, and some important things happen inbetween. For want of a better name, let's call thenext handler the merchandiser, Albert Hunt. He'sa fairly large operator and assembles cotton frommany gins in sufficient quantity to have some­thing to offer to the mill operators. Mr. Hunt hasa powerful cotton press that compresses thebales as he receives them into smaller bales-stillweighing about 500 pounds, though. He does a lotof other things to the cotton. He takes samplesof his cotton and grades them, so that he can sellit to the mills on specifications. Then, too, hestores the cotton in his warehouse until the mills

are ready for it. Naturally, he has to pay insur­ance on it and finance it while it's in storage."

"Well, Joe, what does Hunt get out of the $3.00for all these services?"

"Out of the $3.00 the merchandiser gets just6.3 cents. Most of this is for the labor of handlingand sampling the cotton and moving it in and outof warehouses. Some of it, though, has to pay forHunt's machinery, for his warehouses, and forthe money he has tied up in the storage of theeotton until the mills want it."

"I suppose the mills get it next. We haven't usedup much of the $3.00 yet."

"Right. The Apex Company gets the cottonfrom Mr. Hunt. The first thing they do is to cardand comb out the cotton fibers. Then they putthese fibers through a machine that spins theminto cotton yarn. The yarn is then knitted orwoven into cloth."

"What part of the $3.00 do they get?""They get 31.5 cents for their job of spinning

and weaving. It is estimated that 26.7 cents of the31.5 cents is for labor in their plant and 4.8 centsis pay for the use of their extensive plant andmachinery."

"Now, I suppose, we're ready to put the shirttogether."

"N0, not yet. There's one more process wehaven't covered. The cloth must be bleached ordyed or printed. That is the job of the UnicornCorporation. Then they put up the eloth in fin­ished bolts ready for manufacture. The UnicornCorporation gets 25.5 cents of the $3.00 for theirwork on the cloth, and a small part of the 25.5cents is for the use of their machinery and equip­ment; again, most of it is for labor in the plant."

"So far, Joe, we've taken the shirt throughfive different processes and if I've added correctly,we've accounted for less than 90 cents of the $3.00and we're all ready to manufacture the shirt. Isthat right?"

"Yes, Mr. Jones. The Quality Shirt Companytakes the bleached, dyed or printed cloth andmakes it into shirts. The process includes cutting,assembling and finishing, as well as the addition

of buttons and thread, which is also cotton. Forits job, the Quality Company gets about 90 centsof the final $3.00. Approximately 76 cents of thisis for labor in the plant and 14 cents is pay forthe plant capital."

Distribution Services

"Now that the shirt is made, I'd think that it'sabout ready for the customer; but I see we'veused only about $1.80 of the $3.00 he pays for it.How come, Joe?"

"Well, Mr. Jones, the rest of it is in the fieldof distribution and that's getting close to the jobI know something about. I believe many peopleoverlook the importance of that part of it. It in­cludes services we can't very well do without inour complex economy. Let's see what it costs.

"First, there's the wholesaler who takes theshirts from the manufacturer to the retail store.The manufacturer must assemble and warehouseshirts from many different manufacturers. Healso stores them until the retail trade is readyfor them. Of course, there's transportation everystep of the way for this shirt. For all these serv­ices, the wholesaler gets 24.6 cents of the final$3.00 paid by the buyer.

"Now comes the last job in getting the shirtfrom the farmer to you, Mr. Jones. That's retail-

98f!

$3.0090¢

JULY 1955 555

ing-the job we do right here in the store. Thatmay seem like a simple job to you, but actuallyit's a bit complex. We must try to anticipate ourcustomers' demands and plan our business in ad­vance. We must stock a few of many differentsizes and kinds of shirts. We must display themin an attractive way. We have an advertising bill,too. We must hire salesmen to sell them. We oftensell on credit ter,ms. Every retailer makes mistakesand finds he has to sacrifice some of his merchan­dise at reduced prices, sometimes at a loss.

"For all these services, we get 98 cents out ofthe $3.00 you pay for the shirt. Youmay thinkthis is too much. Apparently other people havethought so, too, and have tried to do it for less.You probably recall several up and down the streetwho have tried it and have gone broke. There'stremendous competition in the retail business andI believe you would find that if 98 cents is toomuch, competition would soon force it down."

"Well, Joe, the way you put it seems reason­able enough to me. It looks to me like competitionall along the line would tend to keep the pricesreasonable. Now that we see 'what the $3.00 wasused for, why can't we add all the costs together?"

"We can, and when we do, we find that AndyJohnson the farmer, Walter Brown the ginner,Albert Hunt the merchandiser, the Apex Company,the Unicorn Corporation, the Quality Shirt Com­pany, the wholesaler, and our own retail storehere-all of us got a part of the $3.00. The amountspent for labor was about $2.52 of the $3.00 andthe balance, 48 cents, was pay for tools, machinery,land, buildings, financing and even a little for riskall along the line."

"It's really amazing tome that workers alongthe line get that much of the $3.00. If my arith­metic is correct, they get 84 per cent of theamount the customer pays and the 16 per centleft over goes for the tools which the workers use.Isn't that what is commonly referred to as capi­tal?"

"That's right, Mr. Jones.""What you say is probably true for shirts, but

how about automobiles, refrigerators, food, houses,and all the other things we consumers have to buy?Is the final dollar which the buyer pays dividedbetween the worker and his tools in the same way?"

The Common Impulse

"No, Mr. Jones, not exactly the same way. Butthe booklet I told you about gave a similar break­down for all manufacturing combined. For thefive years before the war, out of each dollar ofincome contributed by all manufacturing in theUnited States, 85 cents went to workers for theirlabor, and 15 cents was pay for the tools whichworkers used."

"Then the shirt business looks just about likeall manufacturing, Joe?"

"That's right, Mr. Jones, and similar figuresfor all corporations in the United States tell aboutthe sa,me story. Even if you consider the entirenation's bus.iness, 82 per cent of the income wasfor labor and 18 per cent for the tools whichworkers use."

"Wen, Joe, I must confess I've picked up somenew ideas from your story. I al'ways figured thatlabor got less than half of the value of a productsold and that the rest was profit to middlemenand manufacturers. When you put it on the basis ofproviding tools of the workers, ,it throws a newlight on it. Actually, these tools must be prettyimportant, aren't they?"

"You're right, Mr. Jones, they are important.It is no accident that American workers can earna pair of shoes with seven hours of work comparedwith 104 hours required by an average Russianworker. I've seen estimates that the value of toolswhich workers have at their disposa,l in this coun­try averages around $10,000 per worker. No won­der he's so productive."

"But where do these tools come from, Joe?""They are made possible by savings. A great

many people .in this country save a little of theincome they get for their work and invest it intools which make the workers more productive.People will not save their money for future useinstead of spending it when they get it, unlessthey are paid something for it. This payment islike interest or dividends, and much of the 15cents for tools we were talking about is in theform of pay for savings, or interest and dividends."

"All right, Joe, wrap it up."

[Joe made no mention of the taxes that help boostthe price of the shirt to three dollars. But that'sanother story. EDITOR]

Forty years ago, when he was the vogue, the fictional philosopher

Mr. Dooley spoke of "th' common impuls,e f'r th' same money." He was

speaking of politicians. But is not "th' common impulse f'r th' same

money" the glue ,that holds together the United N'ations, NATO and

all other international clubs concocted in Washington?

556 THE FREEMAN

D.C •WASRl1:\lGTO'N ,

by Frank C.Ra.nighen

In the House gallery, newspapermen have long hada gag about the legislative body they covered. "It'sthe greatest organized inferiority complex in thecountry." What they had in mind was, among otherthings, the disappointments suffered by Housemembers who had to accept, because of protocol, aplace inferior to a Senator. But now in the 84thCongress the epigram has come to be applied to thewhole Congress.

What bloc of representatives of the people couldoffer a more vivid picture of psychic frustrationthan the followers of the late Senator Taft? Be­deviled by their cons,ervative constituents on theone hand, they are pushed around by the N;ew Deal­ish emissaries of the White House on the other.Similarly, conservative Democrats - mostly fromthe South-feel they have to play along with NewDeal members of their party from the North toforward the chances of victory in 1956. "You don'tw'ant to lose your committee chairmanships, doyou?" is an unanswerable reminder. Nor do theN;ew Deal Democrats display signs of mental inte­gration and serenity, for they writhe under theconviction that the White House has taken theirNew Deal program away from them. Only the 100per cent pure GOP New Dealers seem happily un­inhibited; for them there's but one idea and issue-"Ike."

Fortunately, the legislative process-in its verycomplexity-offers opportunities for a healthy re­lease of bottled-up steam, so tha't the representa­tives of the people can occasionally cast a decisivevote pro bono publico,and can virtUOUSly feel theyhave discharged their responsibilities to constitu­ents. Late in May, such a chance came to voice thepopular will on the subject of the Status of ForcesTreaty, something which has stirred anger in thegrass roots for the past ,two years. When thatTreaty was pass'ed ,in 1953, and executed with otherNATO nations, lit became the law of our land (likeother treaties). Americans have come to realizethis principle since the commencement of the highlyeducational discussion of the Bricker Amendment.

Under the Status of Forces Treaty, members ofour Armed Forces, charged with violations of thelaws of the country in which they are stationed,are turned over to the police and courts of the

country. Traditionally, such servicemen were alwaystried by the U. S. military courts and enjoyed dueprotection of our constitutional rights. Since thepassage of the treaty, many American GI's-somewithout trials or Anglo..:Saxon procedures of justice~have been lodged in foreign jails, often for crueland unusual terms of sentence.

Among these cases was one of aU. S. soldier,. convicted in a trial in which he had not been per­mitted to put on his own witnesses; in another, asoldier, suffering from TB, was confined in a dampunderground cell; and in another a serviceman, onappealing his sentence, had his original sentence in­creased from ten to sixteen months.

Disgruntled parents have been bombarding Con­gress with letters of protest for some time. TheHearst and McCormick-'Patterson newspaper chainshave publicized those evils, and a little Washingtonorganization of civil libertarians, Defenders of theAmerican Constitution---'headed by former GeneralP. del Valle, Mr. ,Eugene Pomeroy and General Bon­ner Fellers-have moved in various ways in thefield of the courts and Congress. Largely, thepress has given little attention to the matter, andthe Judiciary has disdained efforts to challenge atleast one case-that of Pfc. Keefe of Maryland.Many in the country, usually clamoring about civilliberties, particularly in behalf of accused Leftists,are silent.

It remained for Representative Frank Bow(Rep., Ohio) to seize a legislative opportunity tobring a test on this matter. In the midst of the de­bate on the President's Military Service bill (cor­rectly diagnosed by the House as a veiled UMTmeasure, and therefore blocked), Bow proposed anamendment to bar the sending of any "trainees"under the program to countries making use of theStatus of Forces Treaty to impose their own pe­culiar judicial procedures and punitive jail treat­ment on American servicemen. The House leader­ship-obviously not in sympathy with Bow-calledfor a division vote, a procedure in which only the"ayes" and "nos" are recorded. The Bow proposalwon, 174 to 56. Newspaperm,en say that if a recordvote (names of those voting are recorded aftertheir votes are cast) had been taken, the majority

JULY 1955 557

would have been larger. A division vote, it is said,enabled 'Some-under the prodding of the whips-to vote against the Bow measure becausetheir constituents would not know how they voted.Bow, flushed with victory, thereupon offered a reso­lution directing the President to renegotiate theStatus of Forc:es Treaty and, if foreign govern­ments involved then refused to denounce the treaty,the President should make it void.

Harry Truman once remarked, sourly, that therewere too many "birds" i.n the Se'nate, seeking bythis pun to make official his political dislike for thesenior Senator from Virginia, Harry Flood Byrd.On May 25, President Eisenhower (who sedulouslyrefrains from such personalities) may have con­curred. For the Senator was chief orator, poli­tic.ian and s'trategist, rolled into one, as he domi­nated the fight which led to the Senate's defeat ofthe Administration's federal highway bill.

That measure, announced early in the sessionwith no little fanfare, projected a $100 billion in­ters'tate road grid, for which the federal govern­ment would put up about $30 billion over a ten­year period. Initially, the plan-buttressed withthe usual argument for an Autobahn essential tonational defense~strucka sympathetic chord in thebreasts of motorists and seemed an admirable,imaginative and "progress,ive" piece of legislation.The road building and road machinery industries,businessmen worried over a recession, Keynesianspenders anxious for more appropriations, anyone(that's the majority) coneerned about traffic con­gestion, and finally GOP politicos (ah! we've againtaken the New Deal spending ball away from theDemocrats)-all responded gratefully. The Eis­enhower liberals saw another step toward re-elec..tion. But Congress, as John T. Flynn once re­marked, constitutes in itself a "powerful prophy­lactic ,against perpetuated power."

Senator Byrd quickly seized upon one ,extraor­dinary feature of the bill-the Administration'splan to underwr.ite the federal contribution by aspecial bond issue which would be serviced outsidethe federal budget and apart from the public debt(now over the original legal limit of $275 billion).Byrd pointed out that if the federal governmentshould borrow money without recording it as debt,and should proceed to disburse the money withoutbudgetary controls, all sorts of similar projects-­for education, hospitals,etc.-would inevitably fol­low. "You cannot avoid financial responsibility bylegerdemain." Thus from the outset of the foren­sics, the great Southern Democrat, national ,expo­nent of fiscal responsibility and economy, emphasizedthe outstanding flaw of the measure and-by hisprestige and continuous efforts-rallied conserva­tive sentiment throughout the country. It was agood job.

It was an exeellent job which he performed in the

558 THE FREEMAN

Senate late in May, when the Administration meas­ure was finally considered, as against the Democratalterna'tive road bill sponsored by s.enator AlbertGore (Dem., Tenn.). The small businessman andfarmer (Byrd is a successful apple-grower andnewspaper proprietor in the Shenandoah Valley)took the spotlight to defend sound finance againstthe floor leader for the bill, Senator Prescott Bush(Rep., Conn.), a Wall Street banker, who rashlyengaged Byrd in debate. Observers found a bit ofsymbolic significance in this match. On the onehand was a representative of New York finance­perhaps more exactly, that financial ele'ment whichhas attached itself from the beginning to Eisen­hower, and is not always too careful about thesoundness of its ventures in "partnership" withBig Government-and against this spokesman waspitted the authentic voice of grass-roots America.

The efforts of Senator Bush to throw SenatorByrd off balance were brave, but as the day woreon, became progressively weaker-to the point thathe almost conceded that the federal highway bondsshould be recognized as the obligations of theUnHed States Government. Meanwhile the VirginiaSenator hammered away: "No such proposal has,ever bee'll enacted into law by Congress"; "I stillsay when bonds go through the books of the Treas­ury ... the bonds should be regarded as a deficit.That is the only honest procedure"; "No corpora­tion of this kind has ever been form·ed by anystate in the Union" ; "Nothing has been proposedduring my 22 years in the United States Senatethat would do more to wreck our fiscal budgetsystem." Finally, he concurred in the description ofthe scheme as being a "double-budget sys'tem," asdid also Senator Walter F. George (Dem., Ga.).

Although the term "states rights" did not appear,that concept permeated the ut'terances of thoseattacking the Administration highway measure,whether from Republicans or Democrats. SenatorRobert S. K'err (Dem., Okla.) displayed concernthat for the next ten Y'ears~the term of the federalpayments-the Secretary of Commerce, now Sin­clair Weeks, should dominate and allocate the mile­age of and expenditures on the interstate roads inthe several states. But not more so than Republi­can Senators Francis Case (South Dakota) andEdward J. Thye (Minnesota).

But it was Senator Byrd who underlined this of­fending aspect of the bill: "It would turn over tothe federal government absolute control over 40,000miles of our most important roads heretofore underthe control of the 48 states. This plan would be thegreatest single step yet taken toward federalpaternalism."

In the end, the Administration measure was de­feated. The Senate passed the Gore Bill which,whatever its defects, did not contain the featuresof the White House bill as above debated.

Collectivism Rebaptized

By FRANK S. MEYER

When two or three years ago Russell Kirk, then amember of the faculty of Michigan State College,published a volume called The Conservative Mind,he hardly expected, it is to be presumed, thatwithin a short time i.t would make him the majorprophet of a flourishing new movement. But theemergence of the New Conservatism, which has forsome time filled the columns of the quarterliesand magazines of opinion and is now spilling outinto the larger world, can indeed be accuratelycorrelated with the appearance of that book.

There were, it is true, earlier premonitions­the shrill cries of Peter Viereck, scattered articleshere and there on a more urbane pitch, and otherbooks of the serious caliber of Dr. Kirk's ownwriting, such as Robert A. Nisbet's The Quest fo'r'Community. But it was The Conservative Mindwhich precipitated the N'ew Conservatism.

The speed of its development has been ,enor­mous, even for a time like ours, when ideas arepackaged into trends and movements long beforethey have had a chance to cure properly. Withinthe past year or so a multitude of books hasappeared, carrying the general theme. To mentiononly a few, Dr. Kirk himself has produced twomore volumes (in descending order of quality, ashe grapples with more concrete problems), AProgram for Conservatives and Academic Freedom.Walter Lippmann in The Public Philosophy hasjumped on the bandwagon, although without ex­plicit acknowledgment, giving a more journalistictwist and more practical momentum to the move­ment. And the real proof that Dr. Kirk's donnishspeculations have' brought forth a gusher is therecent appearance, under the aegis of a publisherwhose scent for current intellectual fashion issecond to none, and with the seal of approval ofthe Charles Austin Beard Prize, of Conservatigrnin America by Clinton Rossiter. This book, hailedas "an eloquent appeal for a new conservatism tosustain the Republic in the ,troubled years ahead,"presents nothing in its essential principles andprogram with which Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. orAdlai St.evenson would seriously disagree.

This fundamental compatibility with thecollecti­vist trend of .the time which comes out so blatantlyin Mr. Rossiteor has been implicit in the New Con­servatism from the beginning, despite much justand tonic cri,ticism of positivist ,ethics and theblatant centralizing tone of the "liberal" atmos-

The New Conservatism, so widely heralded in

the last two years, is at bottom but another

guise for the collectivist spirit of the age.

phere by Russell Kirk and his more serious col­leagues. Why, then, the tendency in circles usuallystrongly critical of collectivism, to receive theNew Conservatism as a valid theore'tical founda­tion for a movement of opposition to i.t?

This is perhaps partly a matter of words, oflabels. The term "liberal" has for some time nowbeen captured by the proponents of a powerfulState and a controlled economy and has been cor­rupted into the opposite of its true meaning. Tobe conservative has, therefore, by usage and con­sent come to mean to be an opponent of that false"liberalism." From a certain point of view therehas been logic to this custom, when by conserva­tive was understood loy,alty to the establishedtraditions of the Constitut,ion and to a free Ameri­can social structure, as over against the Rooseveltrevolution.

A Difference of Principle

But, in fact, conservatism is not a body ofprinciples, but a 'tone, an attitude. That attitudedoes indeed tend to conduce toward a respect forthe wisdom acquired by human beings throughlong ages, and toward a skepticism of social blue­prints, of utopias, of the approach of the Socialistand the social worker. It carries with it, however,no built-in defense against the acceptance, grudg­ing though it may be, of institutions whichreason and prudence would otherwise reject, ifonly those institutions are sufficiently firmlye'stablished.

The fundamental political issue today is thatbetween, on the one hand, .collectivism and statismwhich merge gradually into totalitarianism, and, onthe other, what used to be called liberalism,what we may perhaps call individualism: theprinciples of the prima.cy of the individual, thedivision of power, the limitation of government,the freedom of the economy. This is not a problemof tone nor attitude, not a difference bet,veenthe cons,ervative ,and the radical temperament;it is a difference of principle. What is at stakeare fundamental concepts of the relationship ofindividual men to a society and the institutionsof a society.

On this issue, Dr. Kirk, and others who areseriously interested in the fundamental questionswhich concern him, are at the best equivocal, while

JULY 1955 559

the more journalistic New Conservative's, Viereck,Lippmann, Rossiter, seize upon the attitude ofconservat.ism to justify conservation of--the NewDeal and its works. This kind of conservativemust, in Clinton Rossiter's words, reject the "in­decent anti-statism of laissez-faire individualism."For the New Conservative must not forget man's"need for both voluntary and submissive associa­tion with other men. The individualism of theRight has not been an inspiration for all Ameri­cans, but a ,clever weapon with which the richcould defend their riches and the pow,erful theirpower."

"Liberalism" is wearing a bit thin, fraying atthe edges. Provided the fundamental realities ofpower - group and State over the individual,"sober community responsibility" over "laissez­faire ,anarchy"-are retained (and consolidated).the mantle of the conservative tone can wenbefit the established order of the welfare society.After all, that order is in its twenty-third yearsince the fateful el'ection of 1932. The NewConservatism is, on an intellectual level, a naturalcomplement to the Eisenhower version of Roose­veltism. Conservatism, ,after all, is a relativeterm. The question is: what do you want to con­serve?

What, then, do the N,ew Conservatives wantto conserve? What is the content of their positionand the principles for which they stand? To answerthat question in a brief ,article r,equires at thebest some simplification. There are different menand different emphas,es among the N'ew Conser­vatives. It would hardly be fair to take as repre­sentative Clinton Rossiter's vulgarizations of theNew Conservatism, or the tired platitudes ofWalter Lippmann, or the strident diatribes ofPeter Viereck as his New Conservatism leadshim to the glorification of Adla.i Stevenson. Ho\v­ever a doctrine may be perverted or misused, itsessential value stands or falls on its own merit.That it can be misused is of course a primaryreason for examining very carefully its preten­sions ; but in the end, whatever is made, of them,it is the ideas themselves with which we have tocome to grips.

The Thinking of Russell Kirk

Therefore, it is to the effective thinkers of themovement that analysis and criticism should bedirected. Of these Russell Kirk is undoubtedly themost significant. But it is not an easy matter topin down Dr. Kirk's thinking. There is no doubtas to his general tone and attitude nor as to thesource and content of his ultimate values; but inthe field of human action-the area of ethics.politics and economics-it is almost impossible tofind clear and distinct principle.

To suggest the quality of his tone, one canperhaps do no better than to quote Dr. Kirk him-

560 THE FREEMAN

self: "Now, in sober reality, conservatives are ..•a number of persons, of all classes and occupa­tions, whose view of life is reverential, and whot,end to be guided by the wisdom of their ancestors,instead of abstract speculation."

The source of his ultimate values is the accumu­lated wisdom of Western civilization, impingingupon his imagination most strongly, it would seem,in the forms ,achieved by the English eighteenthand nineteenth centuries and with the spiritualcontent of High Anglican Christianity. Thoseultimate values can be and have been the startingpoint for many modes of action in the world, butintegrally they lead to a belief in the uniquevalue of every individual person, a belief whichis the first principle of any philosophy of free­dom (and which can, of course, also be arrivedat in other ways).

But it is only the first principle. Howeverdeeply it is held, it is not by itself sufficient toguarantee the freedom of men in society. Tooill,any interpretations are possible as to what the"integrity of the individual person" consists of.And, given the persuasiveness of one of theseinterpretations, men will always he found who, ifthey possess the power, will attempt to enforcetheir interpretation on other men. The only waythe freedom of individuals can be protected againstthis ever-present danger is through a second setof principles. While these principles have fortheir aim the actualization of the philosophicaland spiritual end, the freedom and integrity ofthe individual, they are themselves deriv'ed notonly from this end but also from the realities ofhuman life. They are framed with full awarenessof the propensity of human beings to translatethe freedom of other human beings into theirfreedom to do what those with power think isright and just.

In the ethical, the political, the economic spheres,these practical principles are as vital as thegeneral philosophical principle, if freedom is to betransformed from a dream into the actual situa­tion in which men live. They can be rather simplystated, and they are the criterion by which thepretensions of a political philosophy, by whatevernam'e it calls itself, must be judged.

The first of these principles is no more than therestatement of the innate value of the individualperson in political and soci,al terms: all value re­sides in the individual; all social institutions derivetheir value and, in fact, their very being from in­dividuals and are justified only to the extent thatthey serve the needs of individuals.

From this fundamental axiom of the good societyare developed two others, which arise from experi­ence and from understanding of the dangers to free­dom whiCJh lie in the very nature of human beings.Since power ,is the instrum,entality of control bymen and groups of men over other men, and sincein this imperfect world, in the end, the only check

upon power is power, the division of power (bothwithin the political sphere and between the politicalsphere and other spheres ) and unceasing vigilanceto keep it divided, is the essential safeguard offreedom.

With this goes the other and corollary principle,a spec-ial case of the principle of division of power,but of the greatest importanee: the entire sphereof economic activity must remain free of politicalcontrol. For only the strict separ,ation of thesources of a man's material existence-property,employment, provision for illness and old age-frompolitical institutions can enable him to maintain hisindependence of them. And further, if the State,which is the legal repository of force for the preser­vation of the conditions of peaceful civil life and fordefense against external enemies, gains controlover any other sphere of human activity, the veTypossibility of effe·ctive division of power is gone.

Rejects the Tradition of Individualism

If Dr. Kirk's thinking is judged by these prin­ciples, it becomes apparent that he lacks the stand­ards to ·effectuate politically and socially his un­doubtedly genuine concern for the integrity of theindividual person as a philosophical and spiritualtruth. He can criticize with great cogency the de­humanizing aspects of the federal social securityprogram. He can stigmatize the totalitarian impli­cations of the federal school lunch program. Buton thes,e, as on a dozen other practical issues ofgrowing collectivism and the State's encroachment,he shows no sign of understanding the problems ofprinciple reflected. He can write feelingly of thedangers of concentration of power without ever in-·dicating by what standards over-concentration is tobe judged and to what limits it is to be restrained.His books are full of just and shrewd critiques ofaspect after aspect of the contemporary world, butfor every such critique there is, implied or explicit,a condemnation of the ideas and the institutionalframeworks which are essential to the reversal ofthe trend.

Nor is he merely neutral or undecided in his at­titude toward these principles. Once they arestated clearly and unequivocally, he castigates thenlas the abstractions of "defecated intellectuals." Hedetests them and the msn who formulated them andthe whole tradition of individualism as heartilyas he does Marxism and contemporary materialistcollectivism.

If Dr. Kirk is so concerned about the evils hesees around us, the fruits of developing collectivism,and nevertheless rejects the principles of a free so­ciety, what does he propose, what does he standfor positively? Since he presents himself and hisbeliefs always rhetorically, never on a reasoned ba­sis, he can succeed in establishing the impressionthat he has a strong and coherent outlook withoutever taking a systematic and consistent position.

In justice to him, it must be said that he wouldmake a virtue of this. He pours scorn on all thesystematic positions he discusses as being "ab­stract," "radical," "Jacobin," "liberal"; and he ex­alts, as the model of conservative statesmanship,disdain for systematic thought and respect for"prejudice and prescription," that is, for the tradi­tionally accepted.

Dr. Kirk takes as his guide the English states­man, Edmund Burke, and puts him forward as theparagon of conservatism. But what he forgets isthat Burke was fighting against the radical prin­ciples of centralization of the French Revolution indefense of a society whose traditions themselves in­corporiated a systematic, if incomplete, theory offre-edom-the modes of the common law, a consider­able degree of division of power, long-establishedrights of the individual and of property, the prin­ciples of 1688. His reliance upon tradition, uponprescription, upon prejudice in the circumstancesof 1790 would, in the crisis of 1688, have made himthe supporter of a very different policy and of verydifferent principles. Howeve-r much one may re­spect Burke's stand as a practical statesman, it isimpossible to derive a firm political position fromhim. As Richard Weaver has said: "of clear ra­tional principle he had a mortal distrust ... itwould be blindness to take him as ,a mentor."

It can be admitted that the long experience crys­tallized in traditional human wisdom is a necessarymake-weight to the conclusions which reason wouldseem to dictate to a single group or even to theconscience of a whole generation. But to make tra­dition, "prejudice and prescription," not along withreason but against reason, the sole foundation ofone's position is to enshrine the maxim, "What­ever is, is right," as the first principle of thoughtabout politics and society. Such a position is im­moral from any point of view; and actually Dr.Kirk could not accept it, for it is particularly in­consonant with that Christian vision of the free­dom of the soul and the will which he holds. Butwe can only find what he does believe by strenu­ously digging it out of the rhetorical flow. What hebelieves seems to be that the particular strand oftradition which appeals to him, and which he pre..sumptuously considers the only one compatible withChristianity, is right and is the only guide to agood society.

I will not imitate Dr. Kirk's own arrogance whenhe pontificates that "individualism is anti-Christian.It is possible logically to be a Christian, and pos­sible logically to be an individualist; it is not pos­sible to he the two simultaneously." No doubt hispolitical position is compatible with Christianity.but so are many other positions. For Christianity,or any other religious vision, is concerned with therelations between the individual man and God. Andwhile it certainly can, by affecting the inner beingof individuals, affect the way in which they goabout solving the problem of creating tolerable

JULY 1955 561

social conditions, it does not pretend to dictate asingle form of these conditions valid for all agesand ,all times.

Dr. Kirk, however, seems to insist that a certainkind of society is the only tolerable one, and thisnot because he believes in it and puts forward ar­gum/ents to support his concept. This certainlywould be his privilege, however wrong he mightbe. But he pretends inst.ead to have no principlespersonally arrived at. H,e merely recognizes whatis ordained by Providential prescription.

The social pattern whi0h emerges from the hintsand suggestions in his writings (for he never tellsus exactly what he wants and certainly never givesany idea of what it would mean in modern circum­stances) is shaped by such words as "Authority,""order," "'community," "duty," "obedience." "Free­dom" is a rare word; "the individual" is anathema.The qualities of this suggested society are a mix­ture of those of eighteenth-century England andmedieval Europe-or perhaps, more aptly, theyare those of Plato's Republic with the philosopher­king replaced by the squire and the vicar.

No wonder that Dr. Kirk never describes con­cretely what such a society would be like undermodern conditions, with the enormous strength ofmodern industry and modern arms, the decrease indistance and the ease of communication-ina word,with the technological facilities for power and cen­tralization which exist today. Such societies of"authority and order," societies of status, have inthe past, under the scatt.ered and decentralizednature of power then, sometimes involved a con­siderable measure of freedom. But, quite apartfrom the essential and principled superiority of asociety of contract to a society of status in termsof freedom, any society of status today, with theincreased potentialiti/es of power of our times,could only move inevitably to totalitarianism.

As all around us we see signs of regression fronlcontract to status and the growing predominanceof society and State ov,er the individual, when thif;is indeed the chara'cteristic form that the attackupon freedom takes today, Dr. Kirk in the perora­tion of The Conservative Mind can complacentlywrite: "Our world may be passing from contractback to status. Whether that. process is good or

evil, conservatives must prepare society for Provi­dential change. . ."

If indeed our society ever completes the fearfulvoyage on which it has ,embarked "from contractback to status"-from freedom to slav,ery, not toput too fine a point upon it-it will not be thedoing of Providence but of men. And alongsidethose men who have consciously substituted forthe principles of freedom those of socialism andcollectivism, the responsibility will be shared bythose who, while they long for the conditions ofour free ancestors, rej,ect as abstract and doctri­naire the very principles which made them free.Dr. Kirk might well reread the passage from aspeech of Randolph of Roanoke which begins thefourth chapter of his own book on that great states­man: "There are certain great principle'S, which ifthey be not held inviolate, at all seasons, our libertyis gone. If we give' them up, it is perf,ectly im­material what is the character of our Sov,ereign;whether he be King or President, elective or heredi­tary-it is perfectly immaterial what is his charac­ter-we shall be slaves..."

Liberals Welcome New Conservatives

The "liberals" ar'e well aware of all this. Theyrealize that the New Conservatives, with their em­phasis on tone and mood, with their lack of 'clearprinciple and their virulent rejection of individual­ism and a free economy, threaten no danger tothe pillars of the temple. The conservative toneitS indeed welcome now that power is to so largean extent achieved and the time come to consolidateand "conserve" it. Even better, by the magnanimitywith which they receive the New Conservatives intopoUte society, they justify expelling into outerdarkness the principled champions of limited gov­ernment and a free economy as "crackpots" and"fringe elements."

They know their enemi'es. Their judgment isgood. Only the principles of individual freedom­to Dr. Kirk the "conservatism of desolation"-eal1call a halt to the march of collectivism. The N'ewConservatism, stripped of its pretensions, is, sad tosay, but another guise for the collectivist spiritof the age.

562 THE FREEMAN

By EDWARD A. TENNEY

Education of King JerkThe consensus-sated mind typical of today is

guided, not by thought or ethical principles,but by what is regarded as standard practice.

"We are living in the age of the jerk," wrote abusiness executive in defense of the low qualityof some of his television programs. In so writing,he covered more territory than he knew. We doindeed live in such an age, and an inquiry into itsintellectual climate produces disquieting results.For, as I shall try to show, this is not only the agein which the jerk is glorified (he was glorified inJackson's day, too) but the age in which he isnurtured,cultivated, multiplied as the hope ofAmerica. The Elizabethans called him lout, clown,boor but never magnified his merits. We somewhateuphemistically call him (American College Dic­tionary) "unknowing." We do not say "uneducated"because he is so often a graduate of an institutionof higher learning.

An unknowing person is he who cannot judgebecause he has no first principles upon which tobase a judgment. In the absence of these innerguideposts to right action he is almost rudderlessin any welter of contradictory opinions. His onlyguide is the consensus. He has a consensus-satedmind; a count of noses is his governor.

We meet the jerk everywhere in politics, ineconomics, in religion, in the schools. He dominatesby weight of number the age named after him. Infact, he has a philosophy which elevates him toheights heretofore unkown. For to him, the voiceof God is the voice of the lout; the consensus isthe All.

I have exaggerated for the sake of emphasis, andI beg my readers' pardon. The data which led meto such emphatic expression should perhaps havebeen given first. I shall hereafter endeavor to dipmy pen in the cool ink of sobriety.

I have said that a jerk is a jerk because he isunknowing and that he is unknowing because, neverhaving mastered first principles, he has no means ofgoverning his life intelligently. To illustrate howcommon this type of mind is, I shall take a fewfirst principles and show how their absence createsjerks in quantity.

A major, time-tested law of the science of ethicsis that the end never justifies the means nor themeans the end. An evil end corrupts good meansand vice versa. In the recent furore over McCarthy­ism, the M0Carthyites threw this primary guide toaccurate ethical thought out the window with "Wemust fight fire with fire"-a saying equivalent to"We must fight evil with evil." Similarly, the words

heard on many a street corner, "I admire his aims,not his method; smoke the devils out," tell the sametale: hatred of an evil is sufficient to justify evil.

In business the same kind of reasoning occurs.Our friend, the television magnate, who gave us ourpunch line-"We are living in the age of the jerk"-is no isolated specimen of the commercial jerk.He attempts to justify the public presentation ofdebasing images on the ground that those who viewthem are debased also. (One can justify feedingpoison to the sick by the identical argument.)

Follow the "Mostest"

Among many of my college students in recentyears I have discovered a complete absence even ofany knowledge of ethical first principles, principleswhich in any good society must take precedenceover other lower principles. "A good advertiser,"writes one, "is he who promotes the sales of themerchant who employs him to write the advertis­ing; and the best advertiser is he who promotes thehighest sales." The idea that the merchant mightbe a meTchant of hate and that he who promotes orsells hate is contaminated thereby was, to the stu­dent, a patent absurdity.

The depth of this student's conviction that therecould not possibly be a superior ethics which a"knowing" man will impose upon a lower ethics andthus arrive at a superior judgment astonished meuntil I found that I stood in the presence of aconsensus-sated mind and that it had its own ethics."This is standard practice," he said, "and what isstandard practice is right." To go beyond thatpoint is to violate the first and the only principleof consensus-sated ethics, wherein to know whata person should do, one studies what the "mostest"are doing and acts accordingly.

A study of mid-century ethics is quite beyondboth me and the scope of these remarks; but be­cause I am a professional educator I am interestedin its powerful presence in academica and fear thedanger to us and to our students if it is allowed todevelop unchecked.

Its power over the minas of many, students andteachers alike, is to be seen in the way they thinkand in the way they establish or discover truth.

The most startling evidence is in the languageitself. The words, "I think, I believe, I am con­vinced," used to be standard with freshmen coming

JULY 1955 563

out of our public schools. These words are nowbeing replaced by "I feel, my reaction is, my feelingis, it seems to me, it is felt that." A similar shiftin language has gone on in the students' elders."What is your reaction?" is now more commonthan "What do you think ?" Just how this changecame about is not our concern. The change hasoccurred and it may best be illustrated by thefollowing incident.

I asked a class of freshmen to write an essay on:Should Benjamin Franklin have been' made thepatron saint of the Democratic Party instead ofAndrew Jackson? The class had just completedreading biographies of each man, and was beingasked to argue the case for the superiority of eitherone over the other. A minority answered the ques­tion; almost half hedged but gave no reason; an­other minority hedged and gave the reason. It wasthis: "Both of these Americans are national heroesby vote and common consent of the American peo­ple. It is un-American to contest the will of thepeople and to set one hero above another." The un­expressed thought was that I, the teacher, had beensubversive in asking them to judge.

These students were my best students, as thesubtlety of their argument suggests. They cogentlyexpressed what the majority who hedged withoutgiving reasons could not or would not express. Inthirty years of teaching I have asked thousands ofstudents to weigh such evidence, but never beforehas the request been denied because the consensusof the American people was so right and completeas to put the question beyond the pale of thoughtfulthought. Notice the denial of the possibility of rightreason: a good American must feel as the majorityof Americans felt as determined by a consensus offeelings registered at the polls and in the press.(When I lectured my students on their moral andintellectual cowardice, they smiled benignly on me;for they, well-adjusted, feel for a teacher tempo­rarily off the beam. They hold no grudges; mywords represent to many of them "a typical devia­tion from the norm in one who is a holdover fromthe days when people got excited over merely emo­tive words like moral and coward.")

My students are the natural product of the teach­ings of the age; and when they reflect its predomi­nant creed, I blame them not. But I do blame thoseadministrators and leaders in positions of responsi­bility and power who, knowing better, have notgone down fighting. By this I mean thos'e who havepermitted the present situation to develop by com­promising their intellectual integrity and by aban­doning primary laws.

The first principle of education (as basic to thisscience as the principle of means and ,ends is tothe science of ethics) is that education is a dis­cipline and that the ideally educated man is he whopossesses a disciplined imagination, a disciplinedmemory, disciplined emotions, and a disciplined in­telligence. In proportion as any per.son has made

564 THEFR'EEMAN

these faculties his servants is he free. They servehim, and not he them. Similarly and in the sameproportion is he "knowing" or "unknowing." Ifthis basic principle is not true, then education isimpossible even as ethics becomes impossible whenits prime law is abandoned, or as arithmetic ceaseswhen the laws of addition are denied. And yet weprofessional educators up and down the line denyas often as not the principle which makes ourprofession a profession. Illustrations abound; Ishall cite a couple and then sign off.

Discovered: 'Critical Thinking

In Current Issues in Higher Education 1954, pub­lished by the National Education Association, pages88-89, the question asked of an eminent collegiategroup of educators (Group F) is: "Can criticalthinking be taught in social science courses in gen­eral education?" A large fully printed page de­scribes how this question had been moiled and toiledover, how opinions conflicted, and how doubtfulwere the statistical results of "research" on thequestion. But page 93 (Recorder's Report) con­tains another version of what transpired. It wouldappear that out of the discussion a consensusemerged. The Recorder records it with so trium­phant a shout as to jolt the mind. It is: "Criticalthinking can be taught. The teaching of this skillhas merit in the training of good citizens." Thenovelty of this newly discovered truth could onlyhave been novel or true to a group of educationaljerks, minds devoid of first principles and hencesurprised when a first principle is rediscoveredto be what it always was and always will be-subspecie aeternitatis-true.

It is not to be assumed, however, that the con­sensus arrived at in Chicago last March will holdfor more than a year. Again in March of this yearthe same question will probably be asked, and thereis no predicting what answer the consensus willproduce. On this scheme, principles are dated by theyear. The book in which they are inscribed is en­titled Trends, a well-chosen word because in theage of the jerk one studies not Truth but Trendsand Tendencies.

My second illustration is from among literarycolleagues, lest those in the social studies regardthe previous remarks as the narrow prejudice of aprofessor from another department. In a textbookwhich I have been required to teach to freshmenoccurs the following paragraph of instructions tostudents on how to speak or write well.

You cannot in most cases express your appeal tomotives directly or in too obvious a manner. Todo so would make the technique too prominent andwould develop resistance in the audience. Youwould not say, "I want you to imitate Jones, thesuccessful banker," nor, "if you contribute to thiscause we will print your name so that your reputa­tion as a generous person will be known to every­body." Rather you must make your appeal effective

through the suggestion of these things. Further­lTIOre, son1e n10tive appeals which are privatelypowerful, such as the appeal to fear, imitation,personal comfort, or pride, we hesitate to acknowl­edge publicly. Therefore, when these appeals areused in public speech or writing they must beworded tactfully and supplemented by other appealswhich we can publicly admit as a cause for ouraction.

Fortunately, the principle of academic freedomallows me to take issue with the texts in the text­book. In other words, the professor in my collegeis still free to point out errors and untruths intextbooks. Hence I teach my students to recognizethat the author of the foregoing paragraph is whatSocrates describes as a sophist, what the Frenchcall a charlatan, and what we call a jerk. I attemptto demonstrate the spectrum of motives from blackhate to white love and go on to discuss the problemof disciplined emotions, pausing on the text itselfonly long enough to point out that it teaches a lowanimal cunning appropriate to foxes but not to

men, that it is the product of an "unprincipled"mind, and that this kind of teaching can be hadoutside the classroom in the "power" or "influence"books which are best-sellers in Jerkland.

To an educator it is no consolation at all to haveit pointed out that the charlatan and sophist haveplayed leading roles in every historical period. Andhe grows doubly disconsolate when he finds charla­tanism enthroned in the seats of power and soph­istry enshrined in texts. But like the physicianwho carries on amid the patented medicines of theday, the educator endures the present and hopesfor the future. He dreams of a time when in hisbusiness the patented concept of brainwashingchildren and adults so that they will conform topreconceived patterns of behavior is abandoned.He looks forward to a day when men will consultthe principle first and the consensus second. As ofnow, however, he merely endures, an eccentric fig­ure whom the consensus-sated majority may sooneliminate from the American scene.

The World!Js Greatest Suckers

By GE'ORGE W. PRICE

To judge by the criticism against McCarthy, Jen­ner, Velde, Walter, et al, it would appear that thevery worst men in Congress have been in chargeof investigating communism. Since committeeposts are assigned pretty much by party caucusand by seniority, it seems rather unlikely that theRed-hunting posts should go so exclusively to allthe worst men. A more reasonable conclusion, tome, is that any man who conscientiously and effec­tively investigates communism, automatically be­comes the target for abuse by the self-proclaimed"liberals" and "intellectuals."

Still, you must ask, why should these people,who are not themselves Communists, object sostrenuously to investigation of the communistconspiracy? How does an anti-anti-Communist getthat way? Perhaps psychology offers a rationalexplanation of such behavior. Let's see.

One of the very important subconscious drivesis the desire and need to be right. This is a per­fectly proper function, having the utmost surviv­al value, because it acts as a feed-back systemcausing one to correct and avoid repeating mis­takes. Being "right" makes a person feel good;conversely, being "wrong" causes him to feel bad.That is the standard pattern in nature: obedienceto instincts brings a feeling of pleasure and well-

They are the liberals who were hoodwinked bythe Reds. Psychology can explain why manyof them attack investigations of communism.

being, and disobedience brings pain and discom­fiture. In this respect man is no different fromother animals.

What orientals term "saving face" is a conse··quence of this drive to be right; it is a way toallow a person to get out from under his errorswithout having to lower himself in his own esti­mation by publicly admitting to a mistake. Savingface is by no means restricted to the East. We alltend to do it. Happily, most of us are able to say,"I was wrong," without feeling more than mildembarrassment. But there are, unfortunately,many people who cannot so easily admit to theirerrors.

Just Can't Confess

Often, the "rightness" drive is twisted so thatthe person feels that he is and must be alwaysright. His mental security depends on his "right­ness," and it becomes virtually impossible for himto confess making a mistake. It must be under­stood that such a person is not deliberately prac­ticing deception. He is quite honest, consciously.The difficulty is that his warped subconscioussimply does not allow the conscious mind to seethat it has erred. We might say that the feed-back

JULY 1955 565

system has become stuck in one position, so that itcan return only the signal that everything is onthe beam.

Whether this subconscious twist is called acompulsion or a complex or an engram or whathave you, I am convinced that it is the dominatingfactor in the conduct of many people.

I should make it clear that while this compul­sion prevents a man from admitting to mistakes,it does not stop him from making them. Quite thecontrary. It leads the victim ever deeper intoerror, because it prevents him from profiting bypast mistakes.

Now let's consider the reaction of such a personupon being confronted with evidence of his errors.He can't believe that he made a mistake; so itfollows that the evidence must be faked or mis­interpreted, and the presenter of the evidencemust be out to persecute him. His reaction, quitenaturally, is injured innocence, frequently cou­pled with personal abuse of the accuser. (I wouldsay that this is usually underneath the classic"persecution complex.") I don't doubt that everyreader is acquainted with one or more such people,for they are far too plentiful. They go to almostany lengths to avoid having to say, "I was deadwrong. That was a real bonehead play." Humancapacity for self-delusion seems to approach theinfinite; and too often the more outrageous thedelusion, the more furiously is it defended.

Politics Their Field

So far I've been on fairly solid ground, psycho­10gically.Now I'll offer something which is strict­ly my own opinion. People with this aberrationhave a somewhat greater tendency than others toenter the fields of public opinion and politics.This is because in other activities, such as busi­ness or engineering, mistakes usually show upquickly and are punished promptly: the businessgoes bankrupt or the bridge collapses. So theperson who cannot admit, and consequently can­not correct, his mistakes does not last long. Hegenerally becomes a third-rater, a failure.

But many of those who have sufficient drive andintelligence find a place in the political and pub­lic opinion field, because there "rightness" and"wrongness" are so diffuse, confused and equivo­cal that a man can make plenty of mistakes andstill stay on top. All he has to do is blame his

"opponents for everything that goes wrong, whiletaking credit for everything right.

That is standard political method. Many of thepoliticians who use such tactics are quite awareof what they are doing, but many others are thesepeople whom I have attempted to analyze, whohonestly believe that they are virtually alwaysright and are being persecuted by their benighted.enemies.

Having laid the psychological foundation, let's

566 THE FREEMAN

go into a little political history. In the early daysof the New Deal, the government was virtuallytaken over by the self-styled liberals and intel­lectuals. For the first time, so they thought, thegovernment was to be directed rationally, by rea­son and logic. Instead, they made a horriblebotch, partly because they substituted theory andbook-learning for the practical methods of the"Old Guard" politicians whom they despised.When their plans failed, they placed the blamenot on inherent faults of the theories (to do thatwould have made them admit being wrong), buton the opposition of "reactionaries."

The Reds Were Pragmatists

The worst aspect of the botch, as far as I amconcerned with it here, was that the Communistswere allowed to infiltrate the government thor­oughly. The Reds played the liberals for royalsuckers, and by using the pragmatic methodswhich the liberals scorned, they worked them­selves; into positions of influence. They managedto fool the soft-headed liberals into thinking thatthe Communists were on the side of the angels."Nobody here but us liberals, boss."

Eventually came the cold war and the Grea~

Awakening. The evidence of the Red infiltrationbegan coming to light, and a nasty mess of evi­dence it was. But if the evidence showed how badthe Communists were, it also showed how tre­mendously mistaken the pseudo-liberals and al­leged intellectuals had been. And they couldn'tstand it.

Here are these people, thoroughly believing intheir own intellectuality, convinc·ed of their com­plete rightness, suddenly confronted with incon­trovertible evidence that they have been theWorld's Greatest Suckers, and have fallen forthe biggest and most blatant con game in history.The guilt feeling must be enormous. Most people,even apart from the "always right" compulsion,'would do almost anything to avoid facing the factthat they had helped betray their country. Theirminds try to reject the terrible truth, and seek forsome other, any other, explanation. When the de­sire to escape guilt is coupled with the compulsiveinability to admit mistakes, the result is inevi­table. The reaction, in line with the psychologicaltheory which I outlined, is to sweep everythingunder the rug and pretend it never happened. And,of course, to subject the investigators to a con­stant stream of abuse and counteraccusations.

This is what is happening to the congressionalRed-hunters. To many critics, their real faultis not in their methods, reprehensible as thosemay be in some cases, but in the very fact thatthey are digging out communist subversion, andin so doing are exposing the guilt and foolishnessof the "liberals" who were hoodwinked by theReds.

To Shakespeare and the Bible

The Bard: Newly Popular

By H10LMES ALEXANDER

Ghosts are at large in America. Ancestral spirits"\valk the night and call out for us to pay :them heed.Our disillusioned and bewildered country, bothsinned against and sinning, is being haunted bythe shades of its forefathers and being imploredto seek again .the high altars of tradition.

There are many manifesta:tions of this haunting­and-yearning in our uneasy land. One that every­body knows is the return of religion. Statisticallyspeaking, we are in a boom period of church-build­ing and church-going. The success of young evan­gelists, notably the ebullient Billy Graham, is com­mon knowledge. The seventeen-day meeting lastsummer of the World Council of Churches was thebigges1t event for press-radio-television coveragesince the Republican Convention of 1952.

Religion-yes, poetry, too. There are scholarswho say that the affinity between these two is sointimate as to make them one and the same thing.It's undeniable that poetry and religion have madea fast union in our American tradition. On whatmeat did our ancestors feed that made them sopsalm-singing and so eloquent in the use of theEnglish tongue? That's easy. Shakespeare and theBible.

Side by side with religious revivalism today goesthe renaissance of Shakespeare, not on Broadway,but in the provinces, at the grass roots. During aweek last summer I saw seven Shakespeare playsand attended six round-tablediscussions of him at AntioehCollege, Y·ellow Springs, Ohio.When the Antioch festivalunder-the-stars opened in 1952,it drew twelve thousand per­sons in ten weeks. In 1953 itdrew twenty-three thousand.Last summer it pulled fortythousand; and it has two moreyears to run before completing­the presentation of all Shake­speare's known plays.

These figures are almost un­known in urban centers. As aWashington newspaperman, Itried to discuss them at theUnited States Office of Educa­tion, Department of Health,Education and Welfare. No­body had heard about Shake-

A generation in quest 01 lost values

is returning to the religion and the

poetry that sustained our ancestors.

speare sweeping the country! I tried also at theFolger Shakespeare Library, where Shakespearescholars abound. But they hadn't heard aboutShakespeare-in-America until I told them. Lastsummer there were at least 44 productions of 21Shakespeare plays by more than twelve companiesin ten or more American states and Canadianprovinces.

Grass-Roots Success

What's the meaning of it all? As a reporter onvacation at Antioch for the past two years, Ihave been quizzing what experts I could catch­educators, critics, actors, producers, anybody whoseemed to make sense. One school of thought main­tains that the Shakespeare renaissance can be ex­plained by the law of supply and demand. The Bardstill provides the best entertainment that moneycan buy. He COlnes across best on a bare platformstage, preferably outdoors at night, with a fair-to­middlin' company of non-celebrities. The bestShakespeare in the world is Shakespeare-with-the­bark-on, no frills, no nothin'. That must be onebig reason for his grass-roots success. People getthe mostest for their money.

But in addition to such bread-and-butter rea­sons for the Shakespeare boom, there were others, Ithink, more profound and persuasive. Without

being a preacher and much lessa prude, Shakespeare is thegreatest evangelist of the his­toric English tongue. He's not 3

moraliz'er, but he's a moralist ofthe loftiest order. He speakssomething special to an Ameri­can generation in quest of lostvalues.

Have you ever thought ho"\vcontinent, how constant, howconventional Shakespeare'stypical heroines are? Julietgoes to her bridal tryst with "apair of stainless maidenhoods."Miranda and her betrothed areon an island where they cannotmarry and yet they agree notto consummate their love with­out marriage. Desdemona, ablameless wife, is coarsely ac-

JULY 1955 567

cused by her husband of adultery. She goes griev­ing to bed and wondering in her innocence if"there be women do abuse their husbands in suchgross kind?" Other wives, like Brutus' LadyPortia, demand to share their husbands' troubles-or to die, as Portia did, sacrificiallY. Therenever was a better-trained, more obedient wifethan Katharine, the ex-Shrew.

Shakespeare in our day and age would betaunted by the liberal press as a "patrioteer" and"narrow nationalist." What a braggart he was for"this England"!

Of Kings and Kings' Fools

It has seemed to me, as a daily writer of Wash­ington politics, that much of our groping in thedark is a quest to rediscover the dignity of office.Historians have often regarded the election andadministration of Andrew J acksonas the GreatDivide of American history. Liberals proclaimJackson's presidency as the triumph of the commonman. Conservatives point out that the six Presi­dents who preceded Jackson-Washington, the twoAdamses, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe-were sing­ularly uncommon men. While the six who followedJackson-Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Tay­lor, Fillmore-were the beginners in a long line ofmediocrities and hacks.

Well, Shakespeare has much to say about ruler­ship. The kings on whom he puts his stamp ofapproval are gentle and gracious, like King Duncanin Macbeth, or of great intellectual and moralstature, such as Prince Hamlet describes his deadfather to be. But it has occurred to me that whatShakespeare stresses nlost about rulership is ,thatit be continuous and self-disciplined. He is tellingus that government should be unbroken andorderly; dignified, not self-s'erving.

The best source of Shakespeare on rulership arethe so-called Chronicle Plays. The best of theseare Richard II, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and HenryV. In the first we are shown Henry Bolingbroke,an ambitious noble who usurps the crown, causesthe true King to be assassinated and begins whatto superficial observation is a successful reign.But behind all the pomp and seeming success,King Henry IV is suffering agonies of conscience.This is not so much because he conspired in themurder of Richard II-in fact, Henry can almost

rationalize himself out of that one-but becausehe broke up an orderly father-to-son succession.To add to his torments, Henry is afflicted with aplayboy son, Prince Hal, who roisters about thetaverns with the disgraceful old rogue, Sir JohnFalstaff.

It just doesn't seem possible for Henry's lifeto end happily, but it does. Lying on his deathbed,he's able to place the crown physically upon thehead of his grieving and repentant son. Thus anew royal line has been commenced, and every­thing's going to be all right.

Now, it's my belief that the story-line of theChronicle Plays has its parallel in American his­tory. Jackson's election broke the succession, theroyal line of :Great Men, and failed to start anothersuch dynasty. The rest of the nineteenth centuryafter Jackson saw only one man of real merit in theWhite House-Abe Lincoln. By the twentieth cen­tury our politics had fallen into such Falstaffiandisrepute that today it's a near-insult to call aman a "politician" unless you smile. Are we yearn­ing for something better? Isn't the country alittle ashamed that its true aristocrats of in­tellect and character are passed over in favor ofdemagogues, showmen or empty duds? What theywouldn't give for a Prince Hal to restore thedynasty of Great Men!

Finally, as it seems to me, Shakespeare speaksto Americans through his recognition of a cosmickinship between Man and God. All of his fullyrealized characters, whether kings or kings' fools,think of themselves as creatures of a universe wheregoodness and harmony seek to reign.

As a nation, we Americans have stood at the sum­mit of military and economic power. We find our­selves with weapons to conquer the world; we havethe wherewithal to make the rest of civilizationlook like a poorhouse. Yet what have these su­premacies availed us? We are far from triumphantin the world today. We are conspicuously unloved.We are bewildered.

Many strange philosophies and policies have beenurged upon us in this time of trouble. We havetried some very complicated doctrines upon theadvice of statesmen and for the good of our souls.But it could be that we were right in the first place,long ago. We did a lot better when we learnedabout life, domestic and global, from those oldstand-bys-Shakespeare and the Bible.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,Can be retentive to the strength of spirit;But life, being weary of these worldly bars,Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

SHAKEHPEARE, Julius Caesar, I, iii, 93

568 THE FREEMAN

Ted Williams Signs for $100,000

Tops Babe Ruth's $80,000 in 1931

Boston, May 13 (UP)-Ted Williams signed a one-year contractfor an estimated $100,000 today. Then he promptly announced hewould be ready to play "any position" for the Boston Red Sox in"a week or so."

The New York Times, May 14, 1955

After 24 years of inflation and rising taxes, how do the two salaries compare?

DOLLAR SALARIES

This is a comparison ofRuth's and Williams'dollar sala'ries

TAKE-HOME PAY

But after federal incometaxes, this is a comparisonof their take-home pay.

WHAT THE TAKE-HOMEWill BUY

Inflation has shrunkthe buying power ofthe dollar since 1931,so Williams' take-home paywill buy only about one-thirdwhat Ruth's did.

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If Ted Williams were to have as much buying power in 1955 asBabe Ruth had in 1931, he would have to be paid about $940,000.

When the Government Is Boss

By GEORGE WINIDER

In the FREEMAN of November 1954 Mr. y:\TilliamHenry Chamberlin tells us that the British laborleaders have become lukewarm about nationali­zation of industry, and that neither British minesnor railways offers any evidence of the superi­ority of public to private ownership. Mr. Cham­berlin is, of course, quite right; but it may in­terest the American to consider these two in­dustries in some detail, for they have now beenunder State ownership long enough to providethe facts for an impartial judgment.

In the case of the nationalized mines, failureis particularly damaging to Great Britain, forcoal is the very basis of her industrial and tradeprosperity. Could her mines since nationaliza­tion have provided coal in quantities as great asthose once supplied by private enterprise, muchof her postwar difficulties would soon have beensolved, and the financial aid so generously pro­vided by America could have been largely dis­pensed with. In fact, so· important is coal to theBritish economy that the production figures forthe industry must be considered as almost thesole criterion for its success or failure undernationalization.

In the three years before the last war, Britishcoal mines produced an average of 233 milliontons of coal a year. The mines, still in privateownership, could meet any demands made uponthem, though they were suffering from manydisabilities due to the Coal Mining Act of 1930,passed by the socialist government of RamsayMacDonald. In 1947 production was 240 milliontons, in 1930 it was 243 million, and in 1929, 257million. In the days of real free enterprise, be­fore the first World War, a production of 250million tons a year was common. In 1913 pro­duction was 287 million.

Yet under nationalization, in spite of the factthat millions of pounds have been spent by theState for new machinery, including 100,000,000pounds spent in 1947, the highest production hasbeen 214,324,000 tons in 1952. To this figure,however, we should doubtfully add 12,110,000tons of open cast coal. This is coal lying near thesurface under valuable farm land. This coal wasnot mined under private enterprise because ofits poor quality, and becauHe the destruction ofthe surface land had to be taken into accountwhen estimating costs. The use of this open cast

570 THE FREEMAN

A report from England gives facts and figures

on the nationalized mines and railways: their

failure in both production and labor problem,s.

coal was first introduced as a wartime measure.Its mining, or to be exact its quarrying, is con­tinued today only because of the low productionof deep mined coal. However, even if we includethis open cast coal, total production since na­tionalization is still lower than under free en­terprise.

In the years before nationalization Great Britainhad a great export trade in coal. In 1938, 35 mil­lion tons were exported; in 1929, 60 million and in1913, 73 million. Under nationalization, althoughdemand has been very great, coal exports reachedtheir highest figure in 1953, with 13,972,000 tons.

Coal Shortage

Coal is the one commodity st.ill rationed by theBritish government. During the long cold winterthat has just passed, ,the British people sufferedconsiderably as a result of the coal shortage. Thisis a country where, as Mr. Aneurin Bevan onceinformed the public, only an organizing geniuscould produce a shortage of coal.

The favorite excuse made by the Socialist Partyfor this reduced output of the British Mining In­dustry is that the number of mine workeTs hasfallen from 766,000 in 1939 to 717,000 in 1953.But in spite of the increased mechanization of theindustry, the production of coal is down by a greaterpercentage than the number of workers. In 1953,for example, 82 per cent of the coal produced wasmechanically cut, as ,against 57 per cent in 1937:but output per mine worker was 296 tons peryear in 1953, as agains;t 309 in 1937.

This shortage of mine workers is itself a by­product of the planned economy. Under free en­terprise the miner's wage level ranked third amongGreat Britain's industrial wages. Today it ranksfirst. But, at the same time, there has been a greatleveling of wage scales, and this near equality ofreturn has been increased by social services whichare available to all, irrespective of wages. 'The minerhas reached the top of the wage scale only to findthat ;this means comparatively little. In the olddays when he was paid three times as much as anunskilled road worker, there was some inducementto undertake the arduous and dirty job of mining,but today few men wish to work underground whennearly as much money can be obtained workingat an unskilled job in the open air.

In most planned economies the solution of thisdifficulty is found in the State direction of labor;but, although this method was used in Great Britainduring and immediately after the war, it righthoffended the public conscience, and has been abol­ished. The result has been inefficiency in the plannedeconomy, and the continued shortage of minersis one of the many problems, apparently in­solvable, now facing Great Britain.

Needless to say, nationalization has not pre­vented the price of coal from rising. Coal whichcost 18 shillings a ton at the pi,thead before thewar and 40 shillings a ton in 1947, was 57 shillingslast year and is due for another rise almost im­mediately. In the first year of its operation theCoal Board lost 23,000,000 pounds, but ithe fol­lowing year it rectified this by increasing prices by7 shillings a ton. Since then, by increasing pricesevery year, a small profit has been made in mostyears, so that the total loss has now been reducedto 14,000,000 pounds.

The Board ignores the theory of marginal costsin arriving at prices, and prefers instead to basethese on average costs. The result of this is that452 mines, with an output of approximately 140million tons a year, work at a profit; and 460 mines,with an output of about 70 million tons a year,work at a loss. In some 'mines this loss is as muchas two pounds per ton.

One of the favorite arguments of those whoadvocated nationalization was that it would in­crease production by doing away with discontentamong miners. Mr. Shinwell, who became thesocialist Minister for Fuel and Power, once in­formed Parliament that with no owner to interferebetween the "manager and his comrades, theworkers 'in the pit," an entirely new atmosphere,favorable to production, would be created. Techni­cal reorganization at the pits, and the new humanrelations would lead to abundance of coal.

Sir William Lawther, President of the NationalUnion of Mineworkers, in a letter to the LondonTimes, wrote, "The elimination of private profitwould enable every industry dependent on coal toobtain all the supplies ,it required at prices morefavorable than at present, and British coal wouldtake its rightful place in the world's markets."

But nationalization has not satisfied the workers'demands, and there is more discontent ,than ever.There have been more than eight thousand un­official strikes throughout the industry S'ince theCoal Board took control, and absenteeism, fluctuat­ing at about 12 per cent, is roughly twice what itwas before ,the war.

The Acton Society Trust, a body set up to pro­mote non-party economic and social research, re­cently sent representatives into the minefields to in­vestigate the miners' morale. The following isan extract from their report:

"The intensity of the hatred and scorn whichis felt for the administration is perhaps conveyed

by some of the names which are freely given to them-'glamour boys,' 'fan-tailed peacocks,' 'littleCaesars.' There seems little doubt that the minershave a general impression that they are carryingon their backs a horde of unproductive officials.The miners conclude that posts have been madesolely to provide 'jobs for the boys.' "

The Railroads Fiasco

So much for the miners. Let us now consider thenationalized railways. Here failure cannot beproved simply by producing production figures fromthe Statistical Digest. Here we must rely on publicopinion, where there is a general impression ofgrowing inefficiency which is particularly m'anifestin dirty carriages. Several branch lines have beenclosed, much to the astonishment of those whobelieved that, once the railways were nationalized,the government would carry any losses such linesincurred. There is a report of ,a growing lack ofdiscipline among railway workers which is notliked by the majority, for lives may depend on strictadherence to rules.

There is a growing loss of business to the pri­vately owned road haulage industry. The Socialistscountered this by the nationalization of road trans­port, thus suppressing the competition. Now thatthe Conservative government has restored theirtrucks to the former owners, the railways are be­coming steadily and more obviously out of date.

The railway employee, comparing his wages withthose in the privately owned engineering industry,has concluded that he is one of the worst paidworkers in iGreat Britain. He has chosen the lasttwo Christmas seasons to threaten strike actionto hold up the whole railway system.[Shortly after Mr. Winder sent us this article,came the railroad strike which created a na;tionalcrisis in Britain and threw people out of work inmany industries. EDITOR]

It was recognized on the last occasion that therailways could not afford the increased wages de­manded, so that in surrendering to the strike,threat the government took an important step inGreat Britain's economic history. It accepted theprinciple, so far avoided, that the nationalized in­dustries need not be self-supporting, and that asubsidy would be paid wheTe necessary. At thesame time as the government admitted this sur­render, it issued a White Paper containing a veryambitious plan for modernizing the railways. Manypeople look upon this as a mere political gestureto cover surrender, and believe that it will be along time before much of this plan is put intoeffect.

Mr. Chamberlin is quite right in his contentionthat in Great Britain neither the mines nor therailways offers any evidence of the superiority ofpublic to private ownership. In fact, his contentionis a very great understatement.

JULY 1955 571

~A Reviewer's Notebook '1

By JOHN CHAMBERLAIN ~..~

Wall Street is so mixed up withthe mental and emotional stereotypesof a score of interest groups thatno one, to my knowledge, has everdescribed it accurately. To WilliamJennings Bryan it was a placewhere gamblers bet upon the priceof grain. To the Communists it isthe headquarlters where the "staffwork" of capitalism is done beforethe orders go out to strangle a colo­nial people or to grind the faces ofthe southern sharecroppers or theCalifornia wetbacks. To Senator Ful­bright it is the source of the "specu­lative" fever that periodically drivescommon stocks too high. Practicallynobody sees it for what it is, aplace that regist,ers the impact ofdecisions made elsewhere, whetherin Washington, in Vienna, in theboard room of a Chicago corpora­tion, or in a professor's study in auniversity.

As B,ernard Baruch has said, WallStreet follows the economy-or, toput it more broadly, the culture.Even in 1929 it followed the egregi­ous hopefulness ofa people who hadcaught a legitimate glimpse ofplenty; stocks went higher andhigher as the academic prophets ofthe N'ew Era-Prof.essor IrvingFisher and the rest-kept sayingthat we had reached a new plateau,or that the business cycle was athing of the past. Knowing WallStreet for what it is, Martin Mayerhas made a praisewor,thy att'empt todescribe it behavioristically, withoutlooking for villains. His book, WallStreet: Men and Money (274 pp.,New York: Harper, $3.50), has cer­tain deficiencies in vision, but asa reportorial job it is solid and first­rate. It tells all about the mechanicsof trading in old securi,ties and rais­ing money to float new issues-andif this explains little of the "why"of booms and depressions, well, thatis part of its realism. After all,Wall Street is a place of mechanics,not of production, consumption andthe disposition of humanenergy ingeneral. The "why" is the province

572 THE FREEMAN

of the economist, not of the behav­ioristic observer of events at the cor­ner of Broad and Wall, which is allthat Mr. Mayer has set out to be.

Mr. Mayer begins by describingthe canyons of downtown Manhat­tan, the hanks, the offices of the un­derwriters, the brokerage houses,the odors (fishy when the wind isfrom the east, a smell of roastingcoffee on a nice day), the restau­rants, and so on. He goes on to thepeople, and then to the all-impor­tant paper abstractions - commonand preferred stocks, mortgagebonds, debentures. He takes you in­side the Exchanges, both Big Boardand Curb, and he goes on to presentsome good take-outs on such broker­age firms as Merrill Lynch, Pierce,Fenner and Beane ("We the Peo­ple") and the company run by Car]Marks (a trader in foreign securi­ties who is not to be confused withKarl Marx). It is all very crisp andlively, and a thorough reading ofit will make the financial pagesmore intelligible to almost anyone.

The justification for Wall Streetbecomes absolutely clear as Mr.Mayer shows his brokers and under­writers, his Stock Exchange special­ists and his professional traders,living at one end of a telephone lineor within quick reach of the tickertape. To begin with, it is a fanati­cally hones't place insofar as the dailytransactions go: when a man says,"B uy me a hundred at the market,"it doesn't have to be put into writ­ing; and when a broker says "yes"to a customer it remains yes, comehell or high water. Given this con­ception of the pledged word, it isscant cause for wonder that whenCyrus Eaton's Cleveland house ofi.ssue failed to go through with adisadvantageous Kaiser-Frazer stockunderwriting, the Wall Street com­munity was thunderstruck. The'Vall Street conception of the sanct­ity of the given word is the onlything that makes pos,sible the vastnumber of transactions that take

place within its environs on anygiven day.

But beyond this, Wall Street iswhat makes the free disposition ofhuman energy possible within thewhole United States. As Mr. Mayersays, "the free financial market, com­bining the judgments of industry,underwriters and investors, is theonly known way of allocating re­sources so that succes,ses can benoted and continued, failures rec­ognized and punished." If s.enatorFulbright or anybody else were toabolish Wall Street, some one wouldhave to invent it all over again thevery next day if we were to con­tinue as a free soeiety. This par­,ticular truth has not been a popularone in recent years, but, as l\ir.Mayer notes, the general animusagainst Wall Street is passing. "The1950's," says Mr. Mayer, "are a newperiod in time: puritanism and elassguilt have both gone out of fashion.Young men are no longer reluctantto come down to Wall Street andwork with stoc~s and bonds; peoplein general are no longer ashamed ofmaking money with money. Moneyhas, at long last, become respect­able."

The one big- deficiency in Mr.Mayer's book is its failure to focusclearly on the lines that make WallStreet an integral part of the U.S.-or, indeed, the world-economy.Mr. Mayer gives some interestingfacts about the Wall Street Journal,for example, noting that it is a "com­plete business newspaper." But theWall Street Journal owes its successas a national newspaper to the factthat, while it may be in Wall Street,it is very definitely not of WallStreet. The Journal is run byHoosier.s who came up through itsWashington, D. C. office in the timeof the Great Depression; it derivesits great vitality from editorial an­tennae that pick up tremors fromOshkosh, Ypsilanti, Walla Walla andTimbuktu. I started reading it adecade ago in preference to the up-

town New York newspapers becauseit was the only paper that told mewhat America was doing. Its endcolumn features on the front pageare daily Fortune Magazine articleswithout the Fortune concentrationon reams of minutiae that one isgoing to forget the next day, any­way. And its editorial page is oneof the few in the country that saysthings clearly, and with homely hu­mor. Moreover, its foreign cover­age has proved to be pretty pro­phetic: it took the measure ofBritain's failure with socialismlong before any other newspaperof importance. Altogether, it isquite a paper-and Mr. Mayer'sfailure to point this out is an indi­cation of slight myopia.

Another thing that Mr. Mayermisses is the general failure of theWall Street market analyst frater­nity to give enough weight to thefact that economic decisions aremade within the context of apolitical economy. A friend of minenamed Eliot Janeway is currentlyhaving quite a success as a marketanalyst because of one simple rea­son: he keeps his Washington, D. C.pipelines open. A defense econom~"

is bound to rise and fall with ordersfor planes, for stockpiling, forcapital goods ordered on certificatesof military necessity. Many analystsset great store by the stock-bondyield ratio in making their predic­tions of stock behavior. But thestock-bond yield ratio in many linesdepends, for better or worse, onpolitical decisions-and the analystwho knows his Washington is oneup on the rest. In a truly liber­tarian society this would not betrue-but, unfortunately, we do notlive in a society in which economicdecisions are made for reasons thatmake purely economic sense.

Mr. Mayer's book is almost whollycontemporary: it wastes little timeon back history, or on the pre-S.ECrules-or lack of rules. But thereis enough in it of the past to enablethe reader to make a judgment onthe SEC. In the long perspectiveof time the SEC is likely to provethe single Rooseveltian reform thatwas worth the making. The SECdoes not undertake to "redistribute"the wealth, to take from one per­son in order to give something toanother. All it does is to define therules of honest trading, and to pre-

scribe standards of honest organi­zation. In other words, it sticks tothe proper function of government,which is to protect free individualsin the exercise of their rights.

Since the SEC, there may havebeen instances of what one of Mr.Mayer's characters calls "massag­ing" the market. But with "fulldisclosure" the rule, the buyer ofstocks these days needs no Ful­bright Committee to weep crocodiletears for his plight if he happensto lose money. Moreover, if stocksare "too high" at the moment, letthe politician look to his own be­havior.

If the market is a reflection ofeconomic activity, it is also a re­flection of what the governmentchooses to do about the money sup­ply. When a man can borrow prac­tically the entire amount necessaryto build a home from a lender whohas a political guarantee, no com­pany making wallboard or kitchen­ware or washing machines or pre­fabricated houses is going to suf­fer unduly from deflated stocks. IfSenator Fulbright wants to get themarket down, all he has to do is topersuade Congress to stop subsidiz··ing certain segments of the econ­omy. In 1933 it was good politics togo after the "money-changers" witha snake whip. But the moneymanipulators these days are inWashington, not in Wall Street.Senator Fulbright's investigationmissed fire for the simple reasonthat the "villain" was hiding in theSenator's own closet, not in thebuilding at the corner of Broad andWall Streets.

Wall Street, as Mr. Mayer de­scribes it, is a fascinating place.But a little bit of it goes a longway if you are a person who cannotlive by abstractions alone. Theother day, while eating lunch inEberlin's Restaurant, which is ablock away from Wall Street inNew Street, I saw a man stop sev­eral times between mouthfuls ofBaltimore crabcakes (a deliciousdish) to go over and read the stockticker. That way lies ulcers; it iseven nerve-wracking to watch sucha performance. It is a relief, then,to turn from a book like Mr. May­er's to Louis Bromfield's From MyExperience: the Pleasures and Mis­eries of Life on a Farm (355 pp.,New York: Harper, $4), with its

unabstract pleasure in oinking pigsand fragrant alfalfa and cold wa­termelon and spring-chilled beer.Mr. Bromfield knows as well asany Wall Streeter that the abstractlaws of production cannot beflouted in agriculture any morethan in industry. He can talkabout farming in terms of produc­tion per dollar of investment, perman hour, per unit of machinery.But he can also talk about it interms of gusto and delight; the ab­stractions of economics are fleshedout and take on living form in Mr.Bromfield's random chapters abouthis Pleasant Valley home in Ohioand about the adventures he had inBrazil.

Mr. Bromfield is insatiably curi­ous, and he is willing to learn fromanyone, whether "crank" or not. Butwhile he makes use of the "organic"fanatics who decry commercial fer­tilizers and the use of the mold­board plow, he does not let themride him. What he has done at hisMalabar Farm is to combine the oldand the new, choosing the methodsthat work best after long experi­mentation. His work in buildingtopsoil proves that no land withinreach of water can be permanentlyworn out. Most of his book is aboutbread-and-butter farming, but thereis also a delightful chapter on gar­dening and landscaping. When hereturned to Ohio from his long per­iod of expatriation in France, Mr.Bromfield tried to reproduce a Eu­ropean garden on American soil.It couldn't be done; the Ohio earthwas too luxurious to permit aFrench sense of design and order.Finally, Mr. Bromfield discovered away of letting the genius of the lo­cal take over. Oddly enough, twoEnglishmen showed him the way-­English gardening methodg workedbetter than the tricks and strata­gems that Mr. Bromfield hadlearned in France.

Incidentally, there is a lot in Mr.Bromfield's book that transcendsthe subject of farming. Liking tofling out at stupidity wherever hefinds it, Mr. Bromfield is quick tospeak his mind on such things asforeign policy, collectivism, educa­tion and the American character.Altogether, this is a book for any­one who is interested in the stateof a civilization, whether he is afarmer or a gardener or not.

JULY 1955

Second Defense LineTreaties Versus the Constitution, by

Roger Lea MacBride. 89 pp. Cald­well, Idaho: The Caxton Printers,Ltd. $1.00

Whatever may have been the inten­tion of the framers of our Consti­tution, the words in which they ex­pressed it make it lawful to over­throw that Constitution by thesimple device of an internationaltreaty. We may deplore that pos­sibility, we may protest against it,but, as things stand now, our dis­sentient opinions are unlikely toprevail. "No lawyer today," warnsthe author, "could conscientiouslyadvise a client to risk his liberty orhis property on the ground that it[an international treaty] is invalidbecause not in conformance withthe Constitution."

It is unfortunate that, while thewording of Article VI of the Con­stitution requires that the laws ofthe United States should be madein pursuance of the Constitution inorder to become the supreme law ofthe land, no similar limitation isimposed upon treaties which needonly be made "under the authorityof the United States." It is, ofcourse, true that the reference tothe authority of the United Stateswas inserted in order to cover thetreaties that had been concluded be­fore the adoption of the Constitu­tionand not in order to differenti­ate between the relative importanceof laws ·and treaties. It is also truethat none of the members of theFederal Convention envisaged thepossibility of treaties at variancewith the spirit of the Constitution.There seemed thus no need to guardagainst it.

The effects of this absence of de­tailed definition have been aggra­vated by the Supreme Court's viewthat "the very nature of executivedecisions as to foreign policy ispolitic.al," and the Court's conse­quent refusal to review their con­stitutionality. Clearly, remedial ac­tion is needed, and Mr. MacBridereviews the various constitutionalamendments proposed to this endand adds one of his own.

Mr. MacBride also deals with thepet argument of the opponents ofthe Bricker Amendment that theproposed limitations of the treaty­l1aking power would weaken the

574 THE FREEMAN

national government at the confer­ence table. He points out that theCanadian government is subject tosimilar limitations, but is not.known to have yet been seriouslyhampered by them. He rightly as­serts that the proposal to make alltreaties non-self-executing wouldachieve nothing more than to bringthe United States in line with theprinciples and the practice of themajority of the States of the world.He is too generous to taunt ourinternationalists with their incon­sistency in refusing to follow themajority in this respect, but theymight give the matter some thoughtand might even consider whetherour most serious handicap in in­ternational negotiations is not pre­cisely this absence of a second lineof defense which might make ournegotiators bolder and allow themto take more initiative than wouldbe prudent under present condi­tions. HUBERT MARTIN

New Light on PetainFrance: The Tragic Years, 1939-47,

by Sisley Huddleston. 360 pp.New York: Devin-Adair Co. $5.00

Those of us who have been watch-ing French postwar publicationshave long known that the authorof Terreur 1944 had a pertinentstory to tell, a story which our"court historians" have managedto suppress. We salute the Devin­Adair Company for at last givingus Sisley Huddleston's stirring ac­count of the folly and terror whichswept over France from 1939 to1947. (English publishers consideredthe manuscript inadvisable.)

This report by the famed Pariscorrespondent, who died in 1952, isintensely personal and not free fromdebatable (though thought-provok­ing) generalizations about peoples,political movements and individuals.On the whole, however, it is a trust­worthy personal history of recentEuropean events which breathes theair of integrity and courage.

This Englishman who, out of lovefor France, became a French citi­zen, recites chapter and verse toprove that Mar.shal Petain was oneof the most devoted, farsighted andintelligent Fr'enchmen of our cen­tury. Others ran away to inciteFrenchmen to premature revolt from

their sheltered exile, but Petainchose to stay and serve his Father­land. The defeat of France had beenaccomplished by the little politi­cians; the aged Petain emerged fromretirement to save what could besaved, by an armistice and by hisprudent though painful policy ofwaiting, of attentisme.

At no time did Petain betray theAllies. He could have handed overthe still powerful French fleet tothe Nazis and could have ranged hiscountry with the victorious Germans.He preferred to scuttle the Stras­bourg, seven cruisers, an aircraftcarrier and nunlerous other vessels.He kept the French empire out ofN'azi reach so that it might bethrown into the battle againstNazism in due time.

When it became apparent thatthe unscrupulous Laval had sur­rendeTed to the Nazis, Petain dis­missed him curtly. After eighteenmonths he was forced to take Lavalback, against his will. UnUke otherWestern statesmen, Petain alwaysrealized that it would have been bestto let the Nazisand Bolsheviks de­stroy each other. It was-in Hud­dleston's considered opinion-thesuperficial, vain and impractical deGaulle who made common cause withthe Communists and permitted themto terrorize and almost destroyFrance.

Huddleston furnishes a vast ar­ray of facts to prove that the law­lessness and terror of the so-calledLiberation by far exceeded theabominations of Robespierre's mad­ness and that of the 1871 ParisCommune. At least a million citi­zens, most of them far more loyalo France than the Communists,

were incarcerated. Over a hundredthousand Frenchmen, most of themgenuine patriots, were murdered.

The last safeguards of personalfreedom were swept aside by deGaulle's foolish collaboration withthe Communists and Socialists. Thepress was expropriated and prac­tically donated to the protagonistsof the collectivist bureaucracy.France was made to suffer thebungling and corruption-bearing ex­periments of the planners who wastedthe fruits of her once free economy.

Sisley Huddleston's substantialwork is a much-needed and long­awaited antidote to such spuriouscommentaries on Vichy France asProfessor William L. Langer's Our

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Vichy Gantble. It at last restoresto the Marshal the honorable placewhich he has held in the heartsof the French. It effectively exposesthe fallacies of that ballyhooed Re­sistance movement which had littleto do with the patient and silentlyheroic resistance of those patriotswho refused to jeopardize France'sheritage by making common causewith hooligans, neo-Jacobins, oppor­tunists and the lackeys of Moscow.This is an important book which nofriend of liberty can afford to miss.

FELIX WITTMER

Calm OptimismIn Search of Serenity, by R. V. C.

Bodley. 175 pp. Boston: Little,Brown and Co. $3.00

The lover of freedom who upholdsall possible dignity for fallibleman must breast the storm of over­whelming opposition these days.And in doing so he may have failedto find adequate serenity.

Now a book comes along thatclearly and reasonably portraysthe qualities evidenced in sereneyet principled persons, like thosemost admired among one's ac­quaintances in a world full of ten­sions of mind and body. As such,R. ·V. C. Bodley's In Search ofSerenity is to be prized.

A quarter century ago the au­thor, then sick in mind and bodyfrom the whirl of the "civilized"world, took the personal advice ofLawrence of Arabia and visited thenomadic Arabs. H,e stayed sevenyears and found there the begin­nings of his search for serenity.These experiences were reportedin his earlier book Wind in theSahara.

As the author was once hasten­ing somewhere, an Arab stoppedhim and asked: "What do you dowith the time you've saved?" Thatis an incisive question for Ameri­cans as they whiz on toward thatpredicted time vvhen one in five willspend some of his lifetime in amental institution.

Bodley does not scorn pursuit ofeconomic wants, but he pleads thatthey be kept in proper focus inone's life. "Money is a conven­ience," he says. But: "It certainlydoes not enhance the character ofmen and women or raise them to

positions of moral superiority."And: "It is chiefly the search formaterial wealth which leads mento uproot ancient customs and, inthe name of progress, substitutetheir frenzied conception of liv­ing."

He tells us that a prime requi­site to serenity is humility com­bined with proper self-confidence.And he reminds us of Cicero's ad­monition: "The higher we areplaced, the more humbly we shouldwalk."

The author confesses that ac­quiring a belief in his own lackof importance was one of the hard­est lessons he had to teach him­self. As a lecturer of note hefound that "Lecturing is not goodfor humility." After one has at­tained proper perspective as a bitplayer of his minor role in theinfinite universe, he is then readyto appreciate this gem of advice:"Anyone who really wants Seren-

D Gardening With Nature: How toGrow Your Own Vegetables, Fruits,and Flowers by Natural Methods.By Leonard Wickenden. 416 pages,illustrated. $4.95

D Big Dam Foolishness: ModernFlood Control and Water Storage.By Elmer T. Peterson. A soil andconservation expert looks at ourmulti-billion-dollar program fordamming our rivers, and argues thatwater should be held where it falls.240 pages, illustrated. $3.50

D Electronics for Everyone: TheStory of TV, Color TV, Radio,Radar, and Other Phases of Elec­tricity. By :Monroe Upton. Thissim,ple, witty, comprehensive bookopens up for the general readerthe whole new world of electricity:communications, automation, house­hold equipment, etc. 384 pages,illustrated. $6.00

ity should try not to regret andnever give rein to remorse."

The author, with that calm opti­mism of a careful student of his­tory, gives us these words whichreflect the book's spiritual beauty:

I t is the sea and the rivers andthe mountains and the deserts whichcause men to know themselves. Itis their association with lonelyplaces which teaches them self-dis­cipline. It is the silence which givesthem divinity and then tranquilityof mind. A man who has knownthese pageants of empty lands, whohas heard the roar of the immortalocean, who has listened to the windin the Sahara and stood beneaththe thundering God of the Hima­layas can accept the discord of themodern world knowing that every­thing has some meaning. He canbe grateful and ge'nerous. He can,above all, love with the unselfish­ness of deep understanding. Andthat, more than anything else, willgive him permanent and satisfyingSerenity.

F. A. HARPER

D The Untold Story of DouglasMacArthur. By Frazier Hunt. Thefull sweep of the great soldier's life,exploits, and place in history, hisfriends and enemies. 488 pages. $5.00-

D The Web of Life: A First Book ofEcology. By John H. Storer. Intro­duction by Fairfield Osborn. Thedramatic story of nature in termsof its interrelated parts. 148 ,pages,plus 48 pages of halftones. $3.00

D Seeds of Life: The Story of Sex inNature fronl the Anloeha to Man.By John Langdon-Davies. A fas­cinatingly written study of naturein terms of the re,production of allliving things. 244 pages. $3.00

D Reflections on the Failure ofSocialism. By Max Eastman. Themost beautifully and persuasivelyargued case against the :Marxian­Fabian ideology yet written. 128pages. $2.75

JULY 1955 575

Essay in ConfusionAcademic Freedom, by Russell Kirk.

210 pp. Chicago: Henry RegneryCo. $3.75

Dr. Russell Kirk's book about aca­demic freedom will not really pleaseanyone except those who have moreor less decent impulses in ev,ery di­rection, a certain amount of love foreverybody and everything, butwouldn't for the world engage inhand-to-hand combat with an int,el­lectual problem which habituallylicks all comers and leaves themscarred. What I mean to say is thatDr. Kirk's book on academic free­dom has something in it for every­body from Meiklejohn to Zollo Butno one could conceivably refer to thisbook as a reasoned statement of acoherent position on academic free­dom.

Dr. Kirk tells us, repeatedly, thatteachers need and merit certain im­munities and privileges in virtue oftheir service in behalf of "Truth"­for "it is Truth they worship, nothumanity, and . . . it is by Truththey must be judged, not Demos."Teachers are, Dr. Kirk simplifies it,"bearers of the Word."

The very fact that so careful awriter as Dr. Kirk capitalize'S"Truth" and ".the Word" highlightsthe difficulties he walks into. WhatWord? The Word of Christ? Kirkmust think so, for he says elsewherethat the beginning of wisdom is thefear of God. In that case, wherewould Sidney Hook, a persistent God­baiter, ge.t off asking for academicfreedom for himself? Or the "Word"of Caesar? What is the word ofCaesar, and who bears it, HaroldLaski or Friedrich Hayek?

The point is that the doctrine ofacademic freedom cannot be de­fended on the premise that thosewho defend truth ,are entitled to cer­tain immunities because to do so re­quires the identification of truth andthe social discrimination that wouldfollow against those who believe inerror.

Is it, then, the search for truth,rather than the dissemination of it,that necessitates these special im­munities? It would appear so fromthe definition of academic freedom(by Mr. W. T. Gouch) that Dr. Kirkci.tes with heartiest approval. "Aca­demic freedom is the principle de­signed to protect the teacher from

576 THE FREEMAN

hazards that tend to prevent himfrom meeting his obligations in pur­suit of truth." Now, unlike many ofhis fellow-teachers, who talk aboutthe pursuit of truth but would bedismayed at the suggestion that anytruth exists, Dr. Kirk believes intruth and its discoverability,and isrealistic enough to know that undercertain circumstances, scholars needprotection from the forces of dark­ness. But then again, Dr. Kirkmakes a major analytical blunder. Indefending academic freedom forthese reasons, he blandly assumesthat all teachers are scholars en­gaged in searching out truth.

Yet it is a safe guess that Dr.Kirk is not unaware that in mostcases the teacher is not a scholar.For in one paragraph alone, he re­fers to "the teacher and the scholar"four times, and one must assumethat so fastidious a verbalizer as Dr.Kirk would use two words in theplace. of one only if he had two ob­jects, not one, in mind. Why then,adopt for the active teaching profes­sion a doctrine which is useful onlyfor a few, and can be defended onlyfor the few? And then on top of itall, having been told with some elo­quence about the importance of shel­ter while we search out the heavensfor new stars, we run into a state­ment by Edmund Burke, quoted withexcited approval by Dr. Kirk, inwhich w,e are foreclosed from find­ing new truths in one very broadarea of inquiry, ethics, and discour­aged from searching them out inanother broad area, government.

Having, then, endorsed virtually,every claim for privilege advancedby the American teacher, Dr. Kirksets out to list those qualifications hefeels justifiably limit academic free­dom: 1) N'o teacher "may endeavorto subvert the foundations of so­ciety." Why not? 2) The teachermust not "abuse his opportunitiesby indoctrinating his students."Shouldn't students be indoctrinatedin the Word? 3) Teachers shouldshow "a decent respect" for the con­sensus of opinion of the ages and"the prevailing opinions of the agein which the communit.y of qualifiedseholars exist." Does this mean thatall we need to do to strip, say, HenrySteele Commager of his privilegesunder academic freedom is to demon­strate that he doesn't show such re­spect? 4) No teacher should fail to

acknowledge "a loyalty to the moralorder whioh transc,ends the foibles ofhuman reason." Implement that oneand you'll really have a shortage ofteachers. 5) "A'cademic freedommay properly be restrained, in somedegree, by the right of any societyto ensure its own preservation."There is, at last, a pretty generalconsensus on that point. 6) Dr. Kirk"doubts" that "the .community ofscholars has an unqualified right totamper with every prescriptive moralvalue." So off with Bertrand Rus­sell's head? And Kinsey's, too? And,come to think of it, Oliver WendellHolmes'?

To sum up: I believe that an an­alytical book that seeks to throwlight on a pressing contemporaryproblem is not very useful if signif­icant hunks of it can be justlyquoted to defend virtually everyconsistent position in that contro­versy. WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

From Plato to DeweyA Layman's Guide to Educational

Theory, by Charles W. Coulterand Richard S. Rimanoczy. 153pp. New York: D. Van NostrandCo. $3.50

Are you a "conservative," or a"progressive," with respect to edu­cational theory? A.ccording toMessrs. Coulter and Rimanoczy youare a "conservative" to the extent,for example, that you believe that:1) the common sense of adolescentsis not, by itself, a safe guide of con­duct; 2) students should be requiredto compete with each other for highgrades; 3) the learning processmust involve some involuntary hardwork; 4) class work should be car­ried on within a framework of im­posed discipline.

You are a "progressive," however,to the extent that you believe, forexample, that: 1) scholastic accom­plishments should be measured onlyin relation to the natural ability ofthe student; 2) the learning processcan be an entirely pleasurable ex­perience; 3) discipline should beentirely voluntary self-discipline.

l\10st persons interested in educa­tional matters take sides. This, how­ever, is nothing new. It has goneon since the beginnings of societyand, as the authors say in theirpreface, the explanation lies partlyin the nature of society itself and

in the strains it develops. To helpinterested laymen understaud thepresent strains in American educa­tion this book was written. "It isour purpose," the authors say, "todiscover through a survey of themost important writings on educa­tion, preceding the twentieth cen­tury, what have been the changinggoals or purposes of educators: forout of the accumulated variations ofthought has come the educationalphilosophy of today."

In this book are set forth in mostreadable fashion the educationalviews of the Sophists; of Socrates,Plato and Aristotle; of monasticism;of Charlemagne and Alcuin; ofScholasticism and Thomas Aquinas;of Petrarch, Vergerius, Erasmus,and Luther; of Ignatius Loyola andFrancis Bacon; of Comenius andJohn Milton; of John Locke, Rous­seau and Kant; of Pestalozzi, Her­bart and Froebel; of Horace Mann,McGuffey and John Dewey. "Eachschool of thought is thoroughly dis­cussed and great stress is laid uponthe teachings of Thomas Aquinas inthe thirteenth century-how he wasthe first to unite the teachings ofAristotle with those of Christ, thuslaying the groundwork for theoriesand systems that have markedlyinfluenced both Catholic and Protes­tant education alike."

Perhaps there w'as a time whenyou, a layman, could look upon theeducational views of those histori­cally important persons as beingoutside of your concern; as beingof concern only to professional edu­cators. This is no longer so. Yourschool officials are asking you totake a more active interest in whatthe schools are trying to accomplish.Hence, you are probably finding itnecessary to activate your knowl­edge of these matters, and even toadd to that knowledge. If so, youwill find this book helpful and re­freshing. There are, in fact, almostno limits to the pleasure' which youcould derive from it by inquiringwhether the educational views youhold resemble those held, for ex­ample, by Thomas Aquinas or byFrancis B'acon; by Martin Lutheror by Rousseau. Incidentally, whileengaged in this pleasurable exerciseyou will discover how many of thenew ideas are "old," and how manyof the old ideas are "new."

I was a classroom teacher formany years. I speak from experience,

therefore, when I say that teachersprize above 'all ,else your understand­ing of their creative efforts. Con­sequently, they would, I know, ap­preciate your reading of this bookand discussing it with them.

THOMAS J. SHELLY

T. R. at HomeThe Roosevelt Family of Sagamore

Hill, by Hermann Hagedorn. 435pp. New York: The MacmillanCo. $5.00

This is a leisurely, affectionate book,full of anecdotes, legends and bitsfrom letters, diaries and newspaperfiles. Its hero is Teddy Roosevelt­certainly the most personable Presi..dent we have ever had-and thoughit does not avoid his public career,its emphasis is elsewhere : upon hisequally vigorous private life andthe abundant family which flour­ished around him for 32 years, fora time in the White House butchiefly in a sprawling, architecturallyundistinguished, but w'armly lovedand lived-in house named after theSagamore Indians and overlookingLong Island Sound near Oyster Bay.

A man's home is usually a goodindex to his character. Teddy hadplanned his house himself, ,and ina letter to the editor of CountryLife in America, he not only de­scribed how he went about it, butinadvertently revealed a good dealabout himself. "I did not knowenough to be sure what I wishedin outside matters," he wrote, "butI had perfectly definite views of~lhat I wished in inside matters. Apiazza where we could sit in rock­ing chairs and look at the sunset,a library with a bay window look­ing south, and big fireplaces forlogs. . . . I had to live inside andnot outside the house, and whileI should have liked to 'express my­self' in both, as I had to choose, Ichose the former."

Does anything characterize Teddy,as a man as well as a political leader,more than the confidence with whichhe alw'ays lived "inside and notoutside" himself? The candor withwhich he always began with hisown individual knowledge and ex­perience, and proceeded from there?In everything he thought and did,he arrived at his general view bya direct route through his own pri-

vate self. For inst,ance, he held verystrong views on the "idle rich."But this wasn't because he beganwith any theory about social classes,the rights of the worker, or thewave of the future. He simply, prag­matically, found idleness in anyform boring.

What distinguished him from allthe rest of our Presidents is justthis: his public self, his official iden­tity, his world views, and his ac­tual executive action, did not growout of a rationalized, objective,greater-than-human point of view.They simply sprang up, out of hisdaily, forthright, courageous andundissimulating character, whichalways "had perfectly definite viewsof what I wished in inside matters."

ROBERT PHELPS

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Land of the Great Lie

The Soviet Regime, by W. W. Kul­ski. 807 pp. Syracuse: SyracuseUniversity Press. $8.00.

Anyone who wants a description ofthe Soviet paradise from the mouthsof its makers should read TheSoviet Regime. It is not 'easy read­ing, but it is fascinating and re­vvarding. Professor Kulski has writ­ten an extremely important book,and one which leaves room for noother argument than that of thefarmer at the circus who deniedthe giraffe's existence. For hisvoluminous documentation is alldrawn from Soviet sources. He hasperformed a labor of Hercules.

One impressive fact that emergesfrom this book is that the Sovietgovernment has become steadilymore oppressive since the thirties.This is largely tihe result of war,but it is also closely related tothe ruthless build-up of a war ma­chine intended to carry the bless­ings of communism to benightedcapitalist countries. And it aecountsfor the current demonstration ofthe truth _of the old adage aboutdriving a horse to water.

The basic principle of this so­called workers' and peasants' State isembodied in these words which Pro­fessor Kulski quotes from Pravda:"The interests of the state aresuperior to everything." And theattitude of the State toward thepeople is defined in this quotationfrom Stalin: "It is indispensable tomechanize manpower." Such a State,with such an attitude, could hardlybe expected to show concern forindividual welfare or predilection,or even rudimentary justice or re­gard for human dignity; and theSoviet State shows none. But it isdeeply concerned with making it ap-

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578 THE FREEMAN

pear that its worst crimes againstthe people express the popular will.To this end it imposes upon itshelpless serfs the ultimate humilia­tion of appearing to acquiesce intheir own abasement.

Another striking fact is theabandonment of what Russian Com­munists now call "rotten egalitarian­ism." The regime is deliberatelybuilding a society of classes as abulwark of its power, realizing thatantagonism of each class towardthose more privileged will deflectresentment from itself. At the topis the intelligentsia, which may livein luxury so long as it conformsto the dictates of the ruling clique.Then come the skilled workers, thearistocrats of the industrial labor­ing class. Below them are the un­skilled workers, and below these thepeasants, the most savagely op­pressed (and most numerous) class,except for the nameless millions inthe slave camps, about which onewishes Professor Kulski had beenable to furnish more information.

Such, after thirty-eight years, isthe "Fatherland of the Workers";a land of terror (even in theprivileged upper circles) , of miseryand of lies. Readers of this bookwill understand why the late W. G.Krivitsky once said, "What every­one in Russia, even the Chekists,most longs for, is freedom."

SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE

Free Market MiracleGermany's Comeback in the World

Market, by Ludwig Erhard. 276pp. New York: The MacmillanCo. $4.50

Seldom do we get a laboratory ex­periment for proving or disprovingeconomic theories. Yet that is ex­actly what happened in West Ger­many in June 1948. On a Saturday,shops were closed under a regi­mented economy. Workers had wadsof money that often could not buyeven what the rationing board re­leased. On Monday, every per­son in West Germany had fortycrisp new marks which he had re­ceived for part of the inflated notes.But this new money bought any­thing from vegetables to chinawareand building material. On the Sun­day between, Dr. Ludwig Erhard,Minister of .Economics, had lifted

with a single order practically allrestrictions on trade. He describesthe result: "It was the initia­tion of the market economy thatawakened entrepreneurial impulses.The worker became ready to work,the trader to sell, and the economyin general t.o produce. In this wayalone the conditions making possiblea genuine foreign trade were pro­vided."

This reviewer remembers the riotsinstigated by German labor unionsand Social Democrats. They smashedthe store windows displaying the nowunrationed incentives of Dr. Er­hard's new market economy. Theydemanded the immediate return toa planned economy, with price con­trols, rationing and all that. Dr.Adenauer and Professor Erhard re­mained adamant in their decisionto let the free market put Germanyback on her feet again.

Not a single principle was com­promised. For this reason, morethan anything else, West Germaneconomic growth was unparalleled.Strangely enough, in our "liberal"metropolitan press the return andsuccess of the free market economyin the German Republic got only afraction of the space that was de­vot.ed to the socialistic experimentin Britain. Even our conserv'ativeweeklies now marvel at the recoveryof West Germany, but make littlereference to the economic systemthat brought it about.

A small group of European schol­ars predicted after the last war thatonly countries with courage for themarket economy would return toself-supporting economies and a sta­ble currency before the end ofAmerican aid. Men like Ludwig Er­hard, Walter Eucken, F. A. Hayek,Ludwig von Mises and WilhelmRoepke had had a closer view ofHitler's socialism than had Ameri­ca's pink intellectuals. So did theGerman people who, since 1949, havekept in power a government dedi­cated to a maximization of the freemarket.

While Germany was in the grip ofHitler's socialism, her main econom­ic problem was how to balance vitalimports with enough exports. WhenHitler and his "e~conomists" hadcome to the end of their rope, hedeclared for the economic autarkythat forced him into war.

In 1948 Germany began to cast

off the restrictions which fifteenyears of interventionism had piledup on her economic life. This hadsuch an effect on business ingenuityand individual productivity that hermain problem became how to im­port enough in the face of evergreater exports. Dr. Erhard's bookdeals mostly with the statistics andproblems of that question.

West Germany provided the testour brainwashed generation of"mixed-economy" apostles needed.But a different story about thattriumph of the market economy re­mains to be written. It will dealwith the rapid and almost incredibleimprovement in human relationsbrought about by the return to astable currency and a free market.It will answer the socialist or "lib­eral" escape from facts: "I don'tcare whether or not a market econo­my makes for highest productivityand standard of living. Look whatit does to 'human values,' to the'dignity .of man,' etc." This re­viewer experienced a wide range ofhuman contacts both before and af­ter the return to the market econo­my in Germany. He has no doubtas to which kind of economy safe­guards man's dignity.

HELMUT SCHOECK

Man BelittledAgainst the Stream, by Karl Barth.

253 pp. New York: The Phil­osophical Library. $3.75

What Keynes is among economists,so is Karl Barth among theologians.The list of orthodox Barthians whogo right down the line for themaster is small, but almost all con­temporary theologians acknowledgean indebtedness to him. ItwasBarth who made the sharpest breakwith the optimistic and shallowliberal theology which collap.sed inthe debacle of our age. Westerncivilization suffered most in Europeas a result of two world wars, andconsequently it was there that menwere in deepest reaction against thethinking that had prevailed in theera preceding the first great war.Barthianism took hold during thetwenties and received the label Con­tinental or Crisis Theology.

Barth's massive output is volcanicand somewhat chaotic. He himself

warns us against any canonizing ofhis results up to date, but the gen­eral drift and tendency of histhought is reasonably clear. Thereis in it repeated stress on the illim­itable gulf between God and man;there is disparagement of humanrighteousness if it thinks by moraleffort to accomplish anything signif­icant; there is a general devaluationof the earth and its concerns. Nat­ural theology-the effort to tracethe workings of the Creator in theorder, harmony, balance and good­ness in the universe-is discarded;and so is mystical theology-the ef­fort of persons to discover "the Be­yond that is Within" and to live bythe laws they find written in thedeepest part of the soul.

The practical consequences of thiskind of teaching outweigh the the­oretical, but one theoretical observa­tion is pertinent. If man is as im­potent and reason as dubious assome modern philosophies declarethem to be, how can we know this?To say, in effect, that reason iscompetent to declare itself incom­petent is an absurdity, and raisesquestions about any philosophy thatso concludes.

On its practical side, an ideologywhich belittles man will make everyman small who accepts it as apply­ing to himself. Some men will stag­ger under its weight and affirm theirown weakness and incompetence.They will be just the sort of rawmaterial the men who long to ruleare looking for. We live in an era ofbig government, but before you canhave big government you must havelittle men. Many modern ideologieshave tended to make men little, andhave in that way been pressed intothe service of the omnipotent State.Barth's has been one of these. Barthhimself has favored socialism, butwhile he opposes communism he stillrefuses to ut,ter against it the un­equivocal negative which he opposedto Nazism. "It would be absurd," hewrites in the present volume, " ... tomention a man of the stature ofJoseph Stalin in the same breath assuch charlatans as Hitler."

Against the Stream is a collectionof Barth's postwar writings on socialquestions, and in particular on thepolitical issue between East andWest. Those who ,take that issueseriously will be advised not to ig­nore this portentous book.

REV. EDMUND A. OPITZ

The Pasadena StoryEducation or Indoctrination, by

Mary L. Allen. 211 pp. Caldwell,Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd.$4.00

Mary L. Allen, Pasadena housewifeand mother of school-age children,should be saluted for this book. Shewill be-twice. Once by people whomean it, once by people who meanit in a different way.

The cheers will come from thehandful of vanishing Americansknown as libertarians. Those old­fashioned boys and girls 'will greetthe Allen opus with shouts of gladacclaim at the good tidings it brings.

The left-handed cheers will comefrom those fuzzy intellectuals whosponsor "progressive" education.They will only mean to smear. Theywill brand Mary Allen as an enemyof education. But. if Mary has halfthe brains this smartly done bookof hers indicates, she will take thecastigation, coming from the sourceit does, as a compliment.

Education or Indoctrination isthe story of how the progressiveeducation group in Pasadena, underthe leadership of Superintendent ofSchools Willard E. Goslin, tried totake over the public school systemin that city lock, stock and barrel;of how they darn near did it, andof how, finally, the attack was re­pulsed and the leaders given thebum's rush by an aroused electorat.e.A grand start has been made, andwhat Pasadena has done' other com­munities can do-and will do, ifthey read this book and realize howtheir own schools are probably beingreadied for the kind of assault thatwas so nearly successful in Pasa­dena.

Incidentally, Education or Indoc­trination throws light on why somany high-school students can'tread, can't write, can't figure, can'tspell, don't know their ABC's, and\vouldn't know what in the worldyou were talking about if you shouldmention such things as individualreward for individual merit, andindividual penalty for individualfailure. They don't know thosethings because they haven't beentaught them. But they do know allabout the wonders of the UN andof our social security system. Theyare taught those things.

c. O. STEELE

JULY 1955 579

ECONOMICSWithout solvency, sovereignty is asham. It all dates back to a decisionrendered by the Lords Justices ofEngland in 1605, which ascertainedthat money is only "real" moneywhen it is so· defined by the sover­eign. This allowed Queen Elizabeth Ito pawn off a lot of paper on Ireland.This decision indirectly led to theoverthrow of James II and the suc­cessful revolution of William andMary. James was done under byhis unnatural daughter as a resultof his insolvency. Throughout his­tory, the sovereignty of kings hasbeen hinged to their solvency. InAmerica, where every man is aking, are we secure to our positionwhen we are liable for $5,000 eachunder the national debt?

Solvency and Sovereignty, by RobertRasmussen. 6 pp. The American Mer­cury, 11 E. 36 St., N. Y. C. 35 cents

ONE WORLDOnly a concise and detailed studyof the atheist, barbarian and total­itarian United N'ations, which dailybrings the time closer when theUnited States will be reduced toa province for the spoliation of thehave-not world, will preserve usfrom the approaching dissolution.This study leaves few questions un­answered.

Pro America Study of the UnitedNations Charter and Review. 107 pp.Californi.a Chapter Pro America925 Union Avenue, Bakersfield, Cal:$1.00

SOCIALISMOne m,anager of a public housingproject (a federal venture into therealm of private finance sponsoredby us generous taxpayers) foundhimself beleaguered when he ruledagainst intoxicating liquors in liv­ing rooms. Seems that man has aJl.inalienable right to doff his shoesand drink a glass of beer whilewatching the Yankees whup Wash-

580 THE FREEMAN

ington over television, and membersof the press fought alongside thetenants of the federal housing proj­ect for this right. The fight madecopy for two days, and it endedwith the ignominious defeat of thehousing manager. But the incidentraised some questions not fullyanswered: how much liberty and in­dependence are we willing to sur­render for the privilege of give­away?

This Was the House of Our Fathers:The Implications of Federal Housing,by James J. Kilp.atrick. 4 pp. HumanEvents, 1835 K Street NW, Wash­ington, D. C. 20 cents

EDUCATIONIf yer child is growin up ta be alet­terate, do not necissirily hunt theyello pages of yer phone book forthe adress of the neerest cycletrist.Like as not, yer child has onlybeen taut ta be a dullard by theprogressive ejucators in yer publicskool. Readin and writtin ,are athing of the past to these despen­sers of ablility to spel. Heresthe way some skool children speltrheumatism: roomatoose, rumertism,rumitmus, rumitisiam, rootism,rheumatisem, reuhamistism, rum­matism, roomatism, rumatizi,sm andrhumystism.

Can you believe it?

A Test For Literacy, by Mary Vin­son. 18 pp. 75 Randall Avenue, 'Rock­ville Center, N.Y. 50 cents

Never before in history have somany been occupied with the im­provement of so few. This hyper­social-mindedness tends to suppressindividualism: authorit.arians forgetthe greatest leaders are intensely in­dividualistic. We need education forprivacy to develop the elements ofan integrated personality: an un­derstanding .of the world, moralharmony, serenity of spirit, innerresources to fall back on when inisolation. Why develop thes.e re­sources? Because· we will need

them. Resources of the spirit arelike savings: they must be accumu­lated before they are needed. Onlyone at peace with himself can betrusted to lead others in the waysof peace.

"To restore the individual to hisformer dignity as a human being isthe urgent need of the day. This... should be the special objectiveof contemporary education."

Education for Privacy, hy Marten tenHoor. 33 pp. Irvington-on-Hudson,N. Y.: The Foundation for EconomicEducation. Single copy free

ART"I am frankly bitter against thosewho encourage obscurity in painting-bitter because the kind of w'arpedthinking which creates it is oneof the prime movers in the currentdehumanization of the arts. I ambitter about the methods of massproduction which require only brightfiat colors and startling designs­regardless of subject matter I-toattract the eye in ithe pages ofslick-paper magazines. I am bit­ter, most of all, against the criticsfor either their utter irresponsibilityor their auto-hypnosis-I have beenunable to decide which-concerningmodern art."

The Public Be Damned, hy Hunting­ton H,artford. 7 pp. Reprinted and ex­panded from an article in the March1955 issue of The American Mercury,11 E. 36 St., N. Y. C. 15 cents

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