Burning the Archives (See Editoria' J

The UN Picksa Welfare Czar

Alice Widener

PI·aying the KremlinG,ame in Germany

Freda Utley

How the Income Tax

D'estroys YouHarley L. Lutz

My WarWith the Re'ds

Taylor Caldwell

Freeman Reprints

God and Woman at Vassar

By Nancy Jane Fellers

Miss Fellers' appealing story of herordeal in a "liberal" women's collegehas sold out our issue of November 3,in which it appeared, and touched offa lively controversy in educationalcircles. If you are interested in what'shappening to American education, youcan not afford to miss this story.

10¢ a copy-12 for $1.00$5.00 per hundred

Motherhood Goes International

By Don Knowlton

AFederal Reserve Note whichyou may happen to have

in your pocket carries the re­markable phrase reproducedabove. This masterpiece of"double talk" cancels all guar­antees, removes all assuranceof monetary stability, putsguesswork into every plan youtry to make for the future.

Am erican industry doesn'tdouble talk-it produces. Thisproductivity is why the UnitedStates has prospered. Kenna­metal Inc., for example, manu­factures cemented carbide toolmaterials so hard and durablethat their use has tripled pro­duction in the metal-cuttingindustries. These cementedcarbides are known and ac­cepted for their practicallyperfect uniformity, and con­sistent and dependable per­formance.

Yet-Kennametal Inc. andall other manufacturers andmerchants of reliable goodsmust take in exchange an un­stable and unreliable currency-the value of which shrunk

~~o~o~ N DO ABOUT:JIf;HAT YHlgA

ST.ANDARD .THE c gressman Ifour Senators and o~ the Gold

Ask Ywish to help restor redeemablem~dardwith sound mdne-'&rite to The. gold coin on deman Latrobe, Penn­Gold Standard LhgrUi~format~o~. Thfsylvania. for fU~iu~tary assoClathl0n ~oLeague 18 3: .v .oined toget erAmerican cltlzenr J monetary system.prevent collapse 0 our

.--.£.

60% since 1933-and continuesto shrink, and shrink.

We mus," do away with"double talk;; money-most ofall to protect American citizensfrom political and economicslavery, and conquest by Com­munism. For Lenin is reportedto have said-"The surest wayto overturn an existing socialorder is to debauch the cur­rency."

Sound money can be assuredsimply by returning to TheGold Coin Standard * whichgives any holder of currencythe right to redeem his hold­ings for gold if he is displeasedwith government policy. Withthis control in the hands of itscitizens - history proves thatnogovernmentwill persistentlypursue practices which are in­imical to the best interests ofits people.

And ••• all American manu­facturers, including Kenna­metal Inc.-freed of the effectsof double-talking, fiat currency-will have incentive, thegreatest prod in productivity.

KENNAMfTAL Pne."@,

. Latro~e, Pa.

WORLD'S LARGEST Independent ManufacturerWhose Facilrties are Devoted Exclusively to Proc­essing and Application of CEMENTED CARBIDES

More facts about the international trendto socialism. An article exposi!1g theplan of the International labor Office toplace working mothers everywhereunder the protecting wing of g-overn­ment at the taxpayers' expense. AnAme'rica n delegate wonders why theu. S. government representatives votedfor this and othe'r socialistic proposals.

10¢ a copy-12 for $1.00$5.00 per hundred

How Sick is Socialized Medicine?

By Melchior Palyi

10¢ a copy-12 for $1.00$7.00 per hundred

Other Reprints Available

Consumers Union: A Red Frontlessons of the Steel Strike

The Self-Reliant South

10¢ a copy-12 for $1.00$5.00 per hundred

Address your order to:

The FRIEEMAN. Dept. R

240 Madison Avenue

New York 16. N. Y.

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

Arts and EntertainmentsTwo Grades of Corn WILLIAM S. SCHLAMM 206

Letters . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 214

This Is What They Said.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 205

PoemsHeartbreak Ridge BEN RAY REDMAN 190Praise of Idle Things E. MERRILL ROOT 200

ForeignTrendsN'ATO Headaches CANDIDE 193

Among Ourselves

Our ContributorsThe excellent piece of reportage in this issue,"Facing Both Ways in Germany," arrived bypost from FREDA UTLEY, the eminent authorityon the Far East. Miss Utley is not new to theGerman scene, her "The High Cost of Ven­geance" having been one of the most controver­sial works concerning that defeated, devastatedand troubled nation in recent years.... TAYLOR

CALDWELL has had the distinction of showeringbest-sellers upon the American reading publicwithout benefit of the "liberal" critics. Fewnovelists sell more copies, few novels are sodiligently documented and so eminently read­able. Her article, UMy War with the Reds," isher first for the Freeman. Her novels includethe widely read "Dynasty of Death," "This Sideof Innocence" and "The Devil's Advocate."

"How the Income Tax Destroys You," comesfrom perhaps the foremost authority on taxquestions in this land. DR. HARLEY L. LUTZ, Pro­fessor Emeritus of Public Finance at Princeton,has written scholarly studies on a variety ofsubjects. He has been tax consultant to manycommissions. . . . C. P. IVES ("Harold Laski'sSuccessor") writes editorials gracefully andcogently for the Baltimore Sun on the gnarledproblems of economics and politics.

The Freeman has been undergoing some in­ternal changes which, while of little or no in­terest to our readers, should be noted here be­fore they reach currency elsewhere. Kurt M.Lassen has resigned as business manager andthe officers of the corporation have designatedForrest Davis to assume charge of the businessoperations. With the other officers Mr. Davishopes to enlarge the FreMnan's income. Whileessentially an editor and writer, lVlr. Davishas had, during a generation in journalism,considerable experience in the purely publish­ing side of the periodical business and was fora time a member of the general managementof the Scripps-Howard Newspapers. . . . Mr.Davis is likewise inaugurating in this issue anew editorial column, "An Editor's Notebook,"in which he intends setting down his reflectionsupon the current scene, political, social andcultural, as they relate to the men and mattersthat have come under his notice during hiscareer as a journalist.

In commenting on the recent article by VictorRiesel and Robert Lewin about labor leader PatGorman we slighted the credentials of Mr.Lewin. He is the labor writer for the ChicagoDaily News, a diligent and gifted reporter.

John T. Flynn, known to Freeman readersand toa far wider audience as one of the lead­ing journalists of his generation, recently re­ferred in a radio broadcast to the Richard L.Stokes article on the occupation mark swindle.Said Mr. Flynn, and we quote with pride: "TheFreeman is a magazine of the highest literaryquality, edited by writers of the first order. It. .. presents the most vivid, understanding, ra­tional discussion of the problems of our time."

DECEMBER 15, 1952

A Fortnightly

Individualists

For

FORREST DAVIS

SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE

VOL. 3, NO.6

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN

THE

Managing Editor

Editors

reeman

ContentsCover Cartoon by CHARLES LOCKE

Editorials

The Fortnight. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 185Ike's Cabinet........................................ 187Official Misinformation............................... 187Burning the Archives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 188The Algebra of Planning 188A Leftist Credo...................................... 189Predictions Are Off..... . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 189An Editor's Notebook FORREST DAVIS 190

Articles

Facing Both Ways in Germany FREDA UTLEY 191I Take an English Lesson MERCER H. PARKS 194How the Income Tax Destroys You HARLEY L. LUTZ 195My War with the Reds TAYLOR CALDWELL 198The UN's Welfare Czar ALICE WIDENER 201Harold Laski's Successor C. P. IVES 204

BooksA Reviewer's Notebook JOHN CHAMBERLAIN 207The Newest Leviathan WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN 208Maker of Mystery ALIX DU POY 209Woodrow Wilson A. R. PINel 210We Asked for It DAVID STOLBERG 211Second Harvest EDWARD DAHLBERG 212

THE FREEMAN is published every other week. Publication Office, Orange, Conn. Editorialand General Offices, 240 Madison Avenue, New York 16, N. Y. Copyright in the UnitedStates, 1952, by the Freeman Magazine, Inc. John' Chamberlain, President; ForrestDavis, Secretary; Alex L. Hillman, Treasurer; Suzanne La Follette, AssistantTreasurer.Entered as second class matter at the Post Office at Orange, Conn. Rates: Twenty-fivecents the copy; five dollars a year in the United States, nine dollars for two years; sixdollars a year elsewhere.The editors can not be responsible for manuscripts submitted but if return postage isenclosed they will endeavor to see that manuscripts rejected are promptly returned.It is not to be understood that articles signed with a name, pseudonym, or initials neees­sarily represent the opinion of the editors, either as to substance or style. They areprinted because, in the editors' judgment, they are intrinsically worth reading.

*Real estate data

*Aerial photo-maps

*Topographical maps

*Detailed tax data

*Utilities

*Water analysis

*Natural resources

make

plant site selection

easy

Ca O's cOllfidell/illl

Industrial Surveys"Pin-Point"

Finding the right spot for your new plant canbe a costly, time-consuming job for you andyour organization; let our industrial engineersand research experts make the task easy.They'll gladly prepare a special PIN-POINTsurvey to meet your requirements. The con­fidential services of our industrial engineersand research experts are yours for the asking...no obligation, of course. Write the Chesapeakeand Ohio Railway, Industrial DevelopmentDepartment, Terminal Tower, Cleveland 1, O.

Chesapeake and Ohio RailwaySERVING:

Virginia • West Virginia • Kentucky • OhioIndiana • Michigan • Southern Ontario

THE

reemanM °N DAY, DEC E M B E R 1 5, 1 9 52

The Fortnight

We read in a Thanksgiving Day column that thePilgrims had it better than their modern de­

scendants. Wild turkeys from the woods. Clamsfrom the Plymouth foreshore. Maize from Squanto'sfish-fertilized hills. And so on. But this is the mod­ern version of the old days of plenty. Truth is thatthe Pilgrims had it terrible for a while. They triedcommunism. It didn't work. Then they tried in­dividualism. This produced. With every man en­titled to the fruits of his own labors, there wasenough for the first good Thanksgiving. If thePilgrims had it better than we moderns, there isonly one reason for it: we have been slipping backinto the collectivist fallacy that Governor Bradfordand his men discarded.

There is an eerie symbolism attached to the vir­tually simultaneous deaths from heart attacks

of Philip Murray, boss of the CIO, and WilliamGreen, head of the AFL. Both Murray and Greenhad tried to commit their organizations in the lastelection to complete, down-the-line support of Ad­lai Stevenson on the assumption that "labor" shouldvote as an entity. But labor itself refused to bedelivered in one monolithic piece at the polls. Therank and file, in other words, continued to followthe precepts of old Sam Gompers, founder of themodern American labor movement, who insistedthat a worker's vote is his own business. Rebuffedby their own followers, both Murray and Greenmay have reacted psychosomatically; they mayhave taken Eisenhower's victory as a sign thattheir day of unchallenged political power was over.This does not necessarily mean that their suc­cessors, ,George Meany for the AFL and WalterReuther or Allan Haywood for the CIO, will goback to the Gompers philosophy. It does mean thatthe labor leader of the future must be toughenough to reckon with revolts from both withoutand within the labor movement itself.

Dr. Jaime Torres-Bodet, the director of theUnited Nations Educational, Scientific and

Cultural Organization, has quit because theUNESCO budget for the next two years was limited

to $18 million, or $2 million short of what hewanted. Ho hum. If it could be proved to us thatUNJi~SCO had ever stimulated a poet to write agood poem, or a novelist to become a fledglingProust or Hemingway, or a playwright to do some­thing worthy of even a week's run on Broadway,or a medical man to devise a cure for the commoncold, or a reader to sit down and go through "Warand Peace" without blinking, or an English criticto understand a Persian painter, we would feelbadly about Dr. Jaime Torres-Bodet's misfortunein being limited to a mere $18 million when heasked for twenty. But as it is? Pardon us, but wecan't weep.

The Freeman has never been inclined to regardGeneral Eisenhower's pledge to visit Korea as a

mere campaign device. The Korean ilnpasse happensto be the most urgent problem facing the Republicand if the President-elect can, as he proposed, arriveat constructive proposals out yonder, more powerto him. We do have a suggestion of our own whichwe hope he will ponder. Let him look into thestatus of the Seventh Fleet which has been, sincethe summer of 1950, safeguarding the coasts of ourenemy, Red China, from the incursions of theChinese on Formosa and nullifying their previousattempts at a blockade. Why not decide as th~ firstact of what we hope will be a glorious reign toorder the Seventh Fleet at once to blockade RedChina and free Chiang Kai-shek's forces for theforays on the mainland that, for one thing, held theChinese Second Army opposite Formosa instead offreeing it to fight in Korea?

D iscussing the Draper Report in our issue ofSeptember 22, we advanced the unorthodox

view that Europe's "dollar gap" ("that seeminglyincurable European hemorrhage") has but little todo with a U. S. protectionist doctrine which alllibertarians must denounce on principle. "The mainobstacle to an expansion of European trade withthe U. S. is by no means the U. S. tariff," we sub­mitted. "It is, of course, Europe's relatively de­clining productivity." And we went on to show thateven a complete abolition of the U. S. tariff couldnot make competitive those European industrieswhose per-item costs, plus transport, are so much

higher than ours. Readers who may have hesitatedto endorse our realism will be interested to learnthat the London Economist did so in its issue ofNovember 1: "It is doubtful whether the completeabolition of the American tariff would enable west­ern Europe to earn sufficient extra dollars to bal­ance its dollar accounts." If the Europeans wouldonly go on from there to discover the one effectiveremedy-Le., greater European productivity ratherthan more U. S. tax dollars-we could really shakehands across the sea.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's capitulation to Stalin'sdemands at Yalta (or so the New Deal court

historians claim) was dictated by our need for Rus­sian assistance in the conquest of J apan-a needthat was impressed upon the President by the spe­cific counsel of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. One ofthem has just annihilated the Arthur Schlesinger,Jr. school of historiography. In "Fleet AdmiralKing," by Ernest J. King and Walter Muir White­hill, the magnificent Ernie "recalls that the JointChiefs of Staff did not agre~ with the President'sidea of 'sweetening' Stalin in order to obtain hishelp against the Japanese." Here is the testimonyof an unmatchable first-hand witness, and it oughtto close the debate: Franklin D. Roosevelt sur­rendered at Yalta on no one's advice but his own.

ehOlly Knickerbocker, as everybody knows, is thesociety columnist for the New York Journal­

American. In brief, he is a chronicler of chi-chi.Supposedly no ponderosity there, no acute cerebra­tion. But, by jingo and by gee, there's more sensein Cholly Knickerbocker sometimes than in all thedouble-dome comment in the far more serious de­partments of far more serious gazettes. For exam­ple, he tossed off this the other day:

The crowd that is really eating crow these daysare the European correspondents. For some reasondifficult to comprehend, considering General Eisen­hower's great personal popularity in Europe, theyslanted all their reports in favor of Stevenson, nevergave Ike a chance of winning, and blasted him as a"reactionary isolationist." What the European cor­respondents-some of them belonging to the mostconservative papers there-did was not only unfair,but was bad and misleading journalism. This col­umnist, for one, can not help but gloat at seeingthem trying to squirm out of their predictionsof absolute Democratic victory. But I'm waiting fortheir apologies to Ike-in print.

If we were a newspaper executive, we would grabCholly Knickerbocker for the editorial page. He'swasting his time on the glamor and caviar circuit.

I s it not also time for a change in Europe's pressrelations with this country? In other words, can

European correspondents who for many years wereundisguised New Deal propagandists now be ex­pected to interpret a Republican Administration?Mr. Alistair Cooke, for instance, recently informedthe readers of the Manchester Guardian that, "inthe American system, when a n~w party comes into

186 THE FREEMAN

power, there is nothing to stop the dismissal of agovernment department sbiff from top to bottom."Nothing at all-except,. of course, the Civil Serviceregulations which secure the permanent jobs ofmore than 95 per cent of all Federal employees.This rather relevant fact Mr. Cooke, for manyyears a resident partisan student of the New Deal,either did not know or chose to manipulate. We arel

not entirely certain which is the more damagingexplanation; but we do know how important it isthat the public of a serious British newspaper becorrectly informed about the incoming Administra­tion, rather than invited to sympathize with Mr.Cooke's nervous cronies in the State Department.

Although it probably is not, Mr. Trygve Lie'sface should be as red as his American em­

ployees who have invoked the protection of theConstitution when queried by the Senate Subcom­mittee on Internal Security about their Communistaffiliations. For it is not so long ago that Mr. Liesmeared the Subcommittee for its interest in theloyalty of these employees to their own country­thus outrageously interfering in American internalaffairs, as Mr. George Sokolsky pointed out. NowMr. Lie's panel of jurists appointed to considerwhether the UN should retain such employees hasadvised him to dismiss all active members of theU. S. Communist Party or other organizationsofficially declared subversive. Moreover, the paneldeclared that the appeal to Constitutional privilegeagainst self-incrimination creates a "suspicion ofguilt," and is valid ground for dismissal. This mayembarrass Mr. Lie; but if we correctly gaugeAmerican public opinion on this issue, he hadbetter· take the advice of his panel if the UN is tocontinue to enjoy U. S. hospitality.

Sister Elizabeth Kenny died without honor inher native Australia on Nov. 30. All the clinics

founded to practice her method of treating polio­mylitis had been closed, and the Minister of Healthhad announced Sept. 10 that the Australiangovernment had no intention of adopting hertreatment. Yet thousands of children in Australiaand elsewhere are growing into normal, activeadulthood because this Australian nurse discovereda therapy which minimizes the ravages of thatdread disease. Although Sister Kenny could over­come the worst effects of polio, she could neverovercome the resistance of the medical profession.History repeats itself: Pasteur was slandered, Sem­melweiss was hounded to his death, because of theinveterate human resistance to knowledge. E pursi muove!

W e are getting a bit impatient with the fashion­able tendency, here and abroad, to deem a

limited interest in foreign affairs a racial charac­teristic of Americans. It was not an Americanstatesman of whom this is said in his "authorizedbiography": "In Cabinet, he would ostentatiously

close his eyes when foreign affairs were under dis­cussion. 'Wake me up,' he would say, 'when you arefinished with that.' " This is what G. M. Young re­ports in his "Stanley Baldwin," just published inLondon. The author, one of Baldwin's most intimatefriends, is beyond suspicion of making matterslook worse than they were: the late Prime Ministerhimself commissioned Mr. Young to be his biog­rapher. And lest it be objected that such ostenta­tious isolationism was a personal and not a nationaltrait, we pass on what the London Economist, re­viewing "Stanley Baldwin," conceded with attrac­tive honesty: "Never more exactly has a people hadthe government it deserved."

The fatal word "Munich" is again being heardin more and more bull sessions on foreign policy,

and so it appears appropriate to recall the forgottenstatement a famous man made in October 1938,after the Munich "settlement." The forgotten state­ment: "I am not a bit upset over the final result."The famous man: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Mr. Goodman Ace, who conducts a TV and radiocolumn in the Saturday Review, recently de­

scribed himself as "being occupied in the radio andtelevision branch of show business, where it wasconsidered foolhardy for an actor or writer to statepublicly whether he was for Eisenhower or forStevenson unless he happened to be for Eisen­hower." Now it just happens that at least seventymillion Americans were witnesses to the audiblecivic-mindedness with which innumerable radio andTV actors and writers publicly worked for the elec­tion of their candidate, Governor Stevenson. To noteMr. Ace's implication of repression as a blatantdenial of verifiable truth would be beside the point.It is much worse than that. The facile readinesswith which some of our McLiberals deny realitydeserves psychiatric investigation.

Ike's CabinetThomas E. Dewey has elected to remain at his

post in Albany for the duration of his term asGovernor. Nevertheless, the Dewey presence will bealmost palpable whenever the new Eisenhower Cab­inet meets. The next Secretary of State, John Fos­ter Dulles, is an old Dewey man. The AttorneyGeneral, Herbert Brownell, twice served as Dewey'smanager in Presidential campaigns. The Secretaryof Defense, Charles E. Wilson, while he has neverbeen active in politics on his own, has been Presi­dent of General Motors, which threw its corporateinfluence to the Eisenhower-Dewey team in the pre­convention struggle last Spring. Governor DouglasMcKay of Oregon, the new Secretary of the In­terior, was an original Dewey man on the Pacificcoast. The Eisenhower choice for Secretary of theTreasury, George M. Humphrey of Cleveland, wasa Taft man in 1950-but in 1952 he sat out the

battle for the Presidential nomination, and he re­ceived the nod for the Treasury job over SenatorHarry F. Byrd, whom Taft would have preferred.

And so it goes. Summerfield, the new PostmasterGeneral, broke to Eisenhower in Michigan in timeto help swing the delegation away from Taft.Oveta Culp Hobby, who succeeds the ineffable Os­car Ewing as Federal Security Administrator, wasan Ike girl from the Ike State of Texas. Stassenswung Minnesota into the Eisenhower column at acrucial moment. Hardly a Taft man or a Taftwoman in the lot, if \ve except the new Secretary ofAgriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, the Utah farm co­operator who is probably agreeable to the Taftitesif only on the basis of his middle name.

We set this down here with no desire to prejudiceanybody against Ike's choices. It can be an excel­lent Cabinet-and the posts of Labor and Com­merce, which are undecided as we go to press,might still go to people who would signify broadparty harmony. Taft himself has said, in his un­emotional way, that he is perfectly able and willingto work with Eisenhower's appointees. The dangerof a Republican rift, if any, will hardly come fromTaft himself, who is magnanimity personified. Butthere is still a job of Republican Party pacificationfor the Eisenhowerites to do, both in terms oflegislation and the distribution of patronage. Forthe sake of the future, we hope that Eisenhower'sown magnanimous impulses carry down through histrusted lieutenants whenever they are dealing withthe Republican boys on the Hill and the Democraticmembers of the conservative coalition, a majorityof whom are Bob Taft's fervent supporters andfriends.

Official MisinformationFrom the day when the remnants of the wartime

OWL and ass were blanketed into the State De­partment, there have been well-founded complaints,both in Congress and out, that the Administra­tion's efforts to inform the rest of the world aboutthis country were costing much more than theywere worth. We have ourselves published such cri­ticism (see Mr. George Creel's "Study in PlannedFutility," in our issue of March 10). But recentstories from abroad indicate that what is wronggoes far deeper than mere incompetence and waste.We refer our readers to Freda Utley's article onpage 191 of this issue, revealing the almost in­credible fact that the office of the U. S. High Com­missioner in Germany is still denying Germans inour zone access to books which the Soviet govern­ment does not want them to read; and the furtherfact that whereas the Amerika Haus libraries arewell-stocked with the works of notorious Commu­nists and fellow-travelers, the few books listed byanti-Communists are catalogued so obscurely as tobe to all intents and purposes inaccessible.

Another disturbing story from Germany broke

DECEMBER 15, 1952 187

into the news soon after Miss Utley's articlereached us. In 1951 U. S. officials there, allegedlywith the laudable motive of "democratizing" thatcountry, commissioned a former German journalist,Arno Peters, and his wife to write a "world his­tory." Only after they had spent $47,600 on theproject and distributed 1100 of 9200 copies re­ceived, did they learn that the authors of the book"were Communists and the book itself pro-Commu­nist, anti-democratic, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic.Nor could they undo the damage they had done;for although they impounded their own copies ofthe book they had generously permitted the authorsto make a large printing for sale throughout Ger­many. So the American taxpayers are not merelythe victims of a $47,600 swindle; they have beengravely injured by incompetent or disloyal officialswho used their funds to finance enemy propaganda.

Nor is there anything very reassuring about thesurvey of American information activities in 44countries, made by correspondents of the New YorkTimes and summarized in its issue of November 24.The most ambitious American information programand the most immediate in effect, is the Voice ofAmerica. And it was precisely that program whichthe Times correspondents found the least effective ofofficial American media of information in all but afew countries. In highly strategic areas such asthe Middle East its popularity is second to that ofthe British Broadcasting Company, whose newsbroadcasts appear to be considered more reliableand less propagandistic.

As we consider this discouraging news fromabroad, it seems to us that the failure of the gov­ernment information programs to show resultscommensurate with effort and expense is basicallydue to the miserable failure of the Truman foreignpolicy. That policy has been inspired less by a firmdevotion to American traditions and interests thanby the hostile Soviet rejection of Mr. Roosevelt'sGreat Design for postwar Russo-American collabo­ration. Its reluctant and belated toughness towardsthe USSR is vitiated by that same anti-anti-com­munism which is endemic among American "lib­erals." The news we have been discussing simplyreflects its unsureness, its softness and its failureto recognize the universal and implacable nature ofthe enemy we face.

What the new Administration will need, first ofall, if it wants an effective information program,is a positive, American foreign policy. Next it willneed competent and reliable personnel. We suggestthat it could save the American people a great dealof expense and grief by asking the three greatnews services to cooperate in broadcasting to othercountries the results of their world-wide news­gathering, the expense, of course, to be defrayed bygovernment subsidy. Such a service would be com­petent, professional, and certainly far more eco­nomical than the present "Voice." And we are will­ing to wager that it would be infinitely more effec-tive.

188 THE FREEMAN

Burning the Archives

T he smoke curling upward from Foggy Bottomthese clear, wintry nights mayor may not arise

from faulty combustion in the Department ofState's furnaces. It is the invariable practice, aseveryone knows, for diplomats before departingfrom hostile capitals on the verge of war to burntheir papers. On the Sunday afternoon of PearlHarbor a sizable group of Washingtonians gathered,in truth, before the Japanese Embassy on Massa­chusetts Avenue to watch the smoke columns thatbetokened the destruction of the Embassy's ar­chives. When under threat of investigation in nor­mal times, bureaucrats in Washington have beenknown to destr~y records which they feared mightharm them if exposed to the light of day.

The changing of the guard due to take place inWashington on January 20 may have given rise tocertain premonitions among bureaucrats withsomething to conceal. Recalling the destruction ofthe records of Communist suspects in the War De­partment files ordered during the war and haltedonly by the vigilance of Senator Styles Bridges(Rep., N. H.), remembering an incident whereinthe State Department itself purged its papers ofreminders of subversive accusations against em­ployees, one can not be too sure that the Eisen­hower Administration will find the archives intactcome January.

The Algebra oj Planning

I n our ceaseless search for instruction on themysteries of Planning (see practically every

issue), we have just learned a lesson from the fish.The Poles are traditional connoiseurs of mari­

nated herring and other delightful fish. Their So­viet government has taken note of that predilectionby organizing the fishing industry. For CommunistPoland, no longer the anarchy of private baiting!The business is now truly and efficiently organized,thus:

The pursuit of salt-water fish is a responsibilityof the Ministry of Navigation. Fresh-water fishare to be caught by the Ministry of State Agricul­tural Farms-except for certain waters under thejurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture andsome others ruled by the Ministry of Forests. Asto the fishermen, they are wards of the Ministryof Small Industries. The production and repair offishing boots and rods is the business of the Min­istry of Heavy Industry. The marketing of fishcaught is a job for the Ministry of Internal Trade.Fish export comes under the Ministry of ForeignTrade.

No wonder that the Polish fish, emotionally asopposed to regimentation as we are, seem utterlyconfused by eight Ministries, particularly as theywould have to pronounce the names of these eight

bureaus in the awesome original Polish. Ratherthan do that, the fish, according to the official Po­lish press, have virtually disappeared. Which sup­plies us with one of the rare algebraic formulasfor a Planned Economy: eight Ministries equal nofish.

A Leftist Credo

Nowadays an honest statement of leftist beliefsis difficult to come by. Not that there has de­

veloped a perceptible scarcity of leftists. The realtrouble is that the current leftists seem to bespending their energies and their powers of ar­ticulation on vehement protests that they are not.In this Age of Lattimore one could almost define aleftist as a person who incessantly swears thatthere is no such animal. Which is a pity. For anyhealthy society needs frankly presented heresies, ifonly to sharpen its teeth on.

So we felt considerable exhilaration when wehit in a recent issue of London's New Statesmanand Nation, on an undisguised and innocently se­rene profession of leftist tenets. The journal'seditor, Mr. Kingsley Martin, decided to clarify con­temporary thought on the Soviet Union by pre­senting his own view on the subject, reduced tomonosyllabic essentials. It is, in his opinion, a"test of political literacy to be able to accept thefollowing propositions, all of which I think aredemonstrably true." What followed was an axio­matic summarization of a leftist's credo so reveal­ing and beautiful that we deeply regret the spacelimitations which force us to reproduce only theseverbatim excerpts:

1. The average standard of living in the USSR is. . . much higher than it was under TsardOlTI, andhas improved, and is in1proving rapidly....2. In Moscow . . . there is a very general sense ofwell-being; though overcrowding is still by ourstandards shocking, the pace of rebuilding is spec­tacular, the standard of entertainment, especially intheater and ballet, far the best in the world, andpeaceful life every day more attractive.3. Development and construction, irrigation andscientific agriculture, are transforming vast, hithertodesert areas of Asia with staggering speed.4. The ordinary S'oviet citizen is not conscious oflack of liberty. He is prepared to leave politics andeconomics to the government. . . .5. The courts and police are, for non-political af­fairs, more popular and common-sensical than oursand not at all repressive.6. . .. No citizen dreams of questioning the arbi­trary authority of the political police nor does heknow anything of torture. . . .7. In general, life grows more civilized in Russia.... Stalin, in short, is the symbol of national self­confidence, of victory, of unity, prosperity and ofpresent and future greatness. . ...8. The standard of education In the SOVIet UnIon IS

now very high. Technical achievement is remarkableand the sale and circulation of non-technical, seriousliterature of many types is quite unprecedented inhistory. There is no obvious censorship....

9. . . . No propaganda is necessary to make theSoviet citizen anxious for peace. . . . If war cameevery Russian would believe, whatever the circum­stances, that the Americans began it and wouldfight ruthlessly, unhesitatingly, hopefully, bitterly,but in the conviction that he and his governmentwere blameless. . . .10. The rulers of Russia do not intend to invade anyother country In this sense Russia is profoundlypeaceful. .

These, we would like to repeat, are verbatim ex­cerpts of Mr. IVlartin's ten basic propositions-allof which, he adds, "can be supported from innu­merable sources."

We could now proceed to a mordantly satiricalanalysis of the type of mind which (in 1952!) iscapable of such suicidal contortions. But we shallnot-not for the moment, at least. For the moment,we are overcome with awe. Sometimes (we do notmind confessing) we have asked ourselves whetherthe Freeman in its relentless war with the leftistintelligentsia: is not fighting shado\vs-whetherthat insanity, that self-rape of the liberal mind, hasnot been erased by the unmistakable and over­whelming events of the past ten years. But then,without fail, there always COn1€S a liberal eruptionas thick and frightening as Mr. IVlartin's. And heis not an accidental tyro. He is the editor of thatparticular journal of opinion which issues the un­disputed party line to Britain's and often enoughAmerica's leftist intelligentsia. Though He will in­dubitably save the Queen, God may hesitate whenit comes to her intellectual subjects.

Predictions Are Off

Regardless of w~at ~he long-term futu~e holds instore for us, It wIll be a happy ChrIstmas for

practically every family in America. Our basis forthis statement comes from a perusal of A. H. Ras­kin's survey of the national employment situation,which was published recently in the New YorkTimes. According to Mr. Raskin's figures, thereare fewer than 1,300,000 idle this December in theU. S.-which means that the "frictional" unemploy­ment figure of 2,000,000, which has been considered"normal" for an economy employing 62,000,000,has fallen by the wayside as a reliable economicindex.

As far as we can see, there are only two broadcategories of the citizenry who have immediatereason to greet Kris Kringle with a shadow ofdoubt in their minds. Those families who have sonsin Korea have plenty of warrant to be sober eventhough the Yule log burns brightly. The otherbroad group which must carry the feeling thatSanta has dealt shabbily with them is the fra­ternity of predictive economists. With notable ex­ceptions, most of them have been worried about"recession." Some of them, indeed, have beenspeaking the dread words, "mass unemployrnent."Maybe the future will bear them out-but the timeis assuredly not yet.

DECEMBER 15, 1952 189

By FORREST DAVIS

An Editor's Notebook

The Freeman in its most recentissue gave some intelligence from

Britain concerning the intention ofan ex-Lord Chancellor to reflectupon the verdict of the New Yorkcourt that found Alger Hiss guilty.Lord Jowett's book, if and when itappears, will be, as we understandit, in the nature of polemics. It isunlikely that any new evidence hasbeen furnished him by AlistairCooke or any of the others who havebeen implicated in the matter ofprocuring Jowett's interest. Whatwe may expect from the learned lawlord· is an opinion. In this matter I,too, have an opinion. My opinion isjournalistic, not legal; it is simplythis: now that Hiss has been deniedparole and Lord Jowett is about toshrive him, now that we have an in­coming Administration uncommittedto the defense of Hiss, why shouldwe not probe more deeply into l'af­faire Hiss?

I am by no means convinced, nordo I think is anyone else even re­motely conversant with the matter,that the whole truth of Hiss's in­famous conduct has been spreadupon the record. He was tried andfound guilty upon Whittaker Cham­bers's word and upon the tangibleevidence supporting Chambers's dis­closures. Chambers undoubtedly sub­mitted' a total recall of his guilty re­lations with Hiss. But others arecarrying about with them equallyguilty knowledge of Hiss's longservice to Soviet imperialism, aservice which worked great harm toUnited States interest, as ClareBoothe Luce convincingly televisedit during .the recent Presidentialcampaign. But even the long recordof Hiss's damaging services enu­merated by Mrs. Luce is not the halfof it.

At a guess I should say that fiftyor more persons have heard, withvarying degrees of credulity, of anincident occurring in President Tru­man's office in August of 1948 whichpertinently illustrates what I have

190 THE FREEMAN

in mind. I do not vouch for the inci­dent, although I have heard it fromusually believable sources. It seemsthat Hiss's leakage of secrets to theKremlin provided one of the mostembarrassing diplomatic incidentsof World War II. You will recallthat Ambassador William C. Bullittwent to Warsaw for the funeral ofMarshal Pilsudski. Upon that occa­sion he gave assurances of Americansupport to the Poles should they re­sist Nazi aggression to the point ofwar.

The assurances were, of course, inagreement with the Franco-Ameri­can pledge of assistance to PolandV8. Hitler, a demarche that provedempty in the performance and whichmay be, as Dr. Charles C. Tansillhas alleged, at the bottom of manyof our present evils re the SovietUnion. Hiss dutifully transmittednews of Bullitt's promises to theKremlin Secret Service, whichobligingly turned the informationover to Nazi Intelligence. Where­upon Goebbels made of it a propa­gandistic field day, charging Presi­dent Roosevelt with being the prin­cipal provocateur of World War II.Our government, obeying a law ofdiplomatic expediency, issued indig­nant denials, yet the allegationechoed in the air over Europe forweeks.

We come now to the day in Augustof 1948, upon which date evidence,gleaned from the N'azi archives, was

Heartbreak Ridge

Under strange skies,On a strange hill,Shapeless he lies,Dreadfully still.

No future his,Youth with no past;Only a name­Bury him fast.

BEN RAY REDMAN

before President Truman indicatingbeyond quibble that Hiss had inthis instance delivered us into thehands of Goebbels via Moscow. ThePtesidentpondered the evidence,then turned to an associate, saying,"We shouldn't try this so-and-so, weshould hang him," meaning Hiss.

A few minutes later the press,ushered in for a news conference,elicited from the President his fa­mous observation that the Hiss casewas a "red herring," calculated todivert attention from the supposedmisdeeds of the 80th Congress.When the press had departed, thePresident remarked to his associatethat he might well have been dumb­founded by the discrepancy betweenhis attitudes toward the Hiss casewhen the reporters were and werenot pre~ent. The associate acknowl­edged that he was indeed dumb­founded.

"You don't understand politics,"the President explained. "They werenot after Hiss; they were after meand I had to take a political view ofthe matter."

I do not propose that you acceptthe foregoing account as gospel.What I do propose is that it shouldbe examined into both for the sakeof the country, of the burgeoningcampaign to resuscitate Hiss's re­pute, and, above all, for the sake ofMr. Truman, who is soon again tobe a private citizen. Whether theincident is apocryphal or not, thecountry is entitled to know. It hasbeen discussed over a score of din­ner tables in Washington, it is inthe domain of high level gossip. Anappropriate committee of the Con­gress .should proceed as rapidly aspossible to investigate the matter,not only as to Mr. Truman's atti­tudes but as to whether in fact theNazi archives turned up unchal­lenged evidence that Hiss informedon the Bullitt pledge to his mastersin the Kremlin. The time has cometo let all possible air into the wholerecord of Hiss's perfidy. Until thenew Administration takes over, untilthe Congress is firmly in the handsof the party which has nothing tohide concerning subversion, the peo­ple can not rest assured that theyknow the whole story of our be­trayal by the Hisses. The new Con­gress has no more urgent task.

Facing Both Waysin Germany

The more I observe United Statespolicy in Germany the curiouser itseems. Weare not only trying tosquare the circle by "containingGerman rearmament" while hopingto "contain" Soviet aggression byforcing the Germans to rearm. Wehave also failed to clear away therubble left by the punitive and un­democratic policies we pursued whenwe were collaborating with Stalin tokeep Germany down and out. We nolonger treat the Germans rough, hu­miliate them, deny them liberty,free speech and equal justice underlaw, destroy their means of liveli­hood through dismantlement, and ingeneral behave as if we believed inthe old Roman adage "woe to thevanquished." But we have failed torescind laws and decrees issued inconjunction with our former allyand present enemy, Communist Rus­sia. Nor, one suspects, have the"Morgenthau boys" or friends of theSoviet Union been entirely elimi­nated from the gigantic bureau­cratic apparatus headed by the U. S.High Commissioner.

Take, first, such basic democraticrights as freedom of inquiry, freeaccess to knowledge, academic free­dom and freedom of the press. TheAmerican public no doubt imaginesthat these basic democratic rightswere long since fully established inwestern Germany under our "tute­lage." This is not the case. For in­stance, I discovered in Munich thatwe are still banning books which theSoviet government considers it un­desirable for the Germans to read!

I was visiting Hubertus zu Loew­enstein, the distinguished Germanhistorian and philosopher who wentinto exile and lost his estates ratherthan submit to Nazi tyranny. Helived t,;velve years in America, wherehe was a Carnegie Endowment Pro­fessor. After Germany's defeat heabandoned the comforts, security

By FREDA UTLEY

and honor he could have continuedto enjoy in the United States, toshare the hunger, humiliation andprivations of his defeated countryand .help bring her back into thecommunity of Western democraticnations. Loe,venstein loves. Americaand likes to tell German audienceshow Americans criticize their gov­ernment and stand up for theirrights. This was not pleasing toU. S. Military Government, whichdebarred him from lecturing toAmerika Raus audiences althoughthese fnstitutions are maintained bythe American taxpayers to "teachdemocracy" to the Germans.

u. S. Enforces Soviet Order

It was from Loewenstein that Ilearned that Allied Control CouncilLaw No.4, dra,vn up by Soviet Mar­shal Zhukov and promulgated onSeptember 15, 1945, is still enforcedin the U. S. Zone. This law not onlybans all Fascist or Nazi books. Italso forbids the Germans to readany book which has a "militarist"or "expansionist" content or is "di­rected against" any of the "allies,"including, of course, CommunistRussia. So in July 1952 Loewenstei,nwas refused permission by the Mu­nich public library to read theMemoirs of General von Seeckt, thecreator of the Weimar Republicarmy who was retired by Hitler!

Strictly applied, this notoriousorder would forbid the Germans to­day to read any anti-Communist lit­erature. It would also prevent themfrom reading N'apoleon's memoirs orCaesar's Commentaries or any his­torical work not written from astrictly pacifist - or Communist­point of view. In fact, during thefirst years of the occupation thestudy of history was omitted in Ger­man schools in the Western zones.Today "our Germans" are privileged

to study some history, even tnoughtheir scholars are still denied accessto many books. However, the spiritof 1945 would still seem to inspirethe U. S. High Commissioner's Of­fice of Public Affairs, presided overuntil July 21, 1952 by Mr. ShepherdStone. Until he came to Germany to"teach democracy" lVIr. Stone wasassistant to Lester Markel, editor ofthe New York Times Sunday edi­tion, whose book supplement used togive so much aid and comfort to theChinese Communist lobby in Aluer­ica. It is therefore hardly surpri~ir:g

that the A merika Haus libraries,paid for by the U. S. taxpayer butcantrolled until recently by Mr.Stone and his assistant Patricia vanDelden; contains many books favor­ing Soviet Russia and extolling theChinese Communists, and few anti­Communist writings.

True, if one searches diligentlythrough their catalogues one candiscover a book or two each by Wil­liam Henry Chamberlin, David Dal­lin, Eugene Lyons, and a few otheranti-Soviet writers too famous to beignored. But these are heavily out­numbered by the writings of OwenLattimore, Edgar Snow, FosterRhea Dulles, Jerome Davis, JohannesSteel, William Mandel, Corliss La­mont, Richard Lauterbach, VeraMicheles Dean, Theodore White,Agnes. Smedley and other Sovietapologists, Communists, or friendsof the Chinese Communists. More­over the anti-Soviet and anti-Com­munist books are hard to find. Thelibrary catalogues of the "U. S. In-

DECEMBER 15, 1952 191

formatlon Centers in Germany"have no section on "Communism,"presumably in order not to offendour former allies or openly trans­gress Marshal Zhukov's Order No.4.Thus one finds such books as Wil­liam Henry Chamberlin's "Blueprintfor World Conquest" (which repro­duces the thesis of the Comintern),Fulton Sheen's "Communism andthe Conscience of the West," and thereport of the U. S. Senate ForeignAffairs Committee on "Strategy andTactics of World Communism," hid­den away 'in a section called "Labor,Capital." Nor are such books as Eu­gene Lyons's "Assignment in Uto­pia," Koestler's "The Yogi and theCommissar," William L. White's"Report on the Russians" and myown book about my life in Russia,"Lost Illusion," to be found underthe heading "Russia." They appearinstead in the "Europe" section.

The German reader seeking infor­mation about Soviet Russia can, itis true, find two of David Dallin'sbooks, together with Kravchenko's"I Chose Freedom," in the "Russia"section of the catalogue. But for themost part he will find only pro-So­viet, "neutral," or anti-anti-Commu­nist books 'listed, including thosewritten by such notorious Commu­nist propagandists as the Dean ofCanterbury and William Mandel. Ifvery clever he may succeed in find­ing Alexander Barmine's "One WhoSurvived" mysteriously cataloguedin the list of authors under BIBar-a designation I have been unableto track down under "Capital, La­bor," or "Form of State," or theother headings under which one findsother anti-Communist books hidingtheir light.

Control of the Press

Freedom of the press requires amodicum of financial independencefor publishers. In West Germanymost newspapers have small circula­tion and little revenue from adver­tisements. Coupled with Germany'sshortage of foreign exchange, thismakes it well-nigh impossible forGerman newspapers to send corre­spondents to America. They are per­force dependent for most of theirforeign news on the British newsagencies which enjoy a near-mo­nopoly owing to the cheapness of

192 THE FREEMAN

their services; or on the Gerniannews agency DPA which is affiliatedwith Reuter's in the United States;or on handouts by the U. S. andBritish High Commissioner's PublicInformation Offices. It is also a factof great importance that the N e~v

York Herald Tribune and New YorkTimes are the only American news­papers with European editions.Thus "news" from America whichthe Germans receive is either Britishorientated, or colored by anti-anti­Communist or "liberal" prejudices.

Instead of American aid beingutilized to help German newspaperssend correspondents to America, thefund of $3.5 million disposed of bythe U. S. High Commissioner for theostensible purpose of "democratiz­ing" the German press, has beenused to subsidize newspapers sub­servient to the New Dealers whorun the Commissioner's Public 1n­forn1ation Office. Thus I found, onmy arrival in Germany in the mid­dle of May, that Senator Taft'sviews and speeches were either beingmisrepresented, or not reported atall, in the newspapers owned or sub­sidized by the American taxpayer,while 'General Eisenhower was beingrepresented as a St. George about toslay the "isolationist" Old GuardRepublican dragon. The American­owned newspaper Neue Zeitungfailed to mention Senator Taft's in­terview of June 6 in Washingtonwith the DPA representative, whilethe papers known to be subsidizedby McCloy gave it only brief men­tion without headlines.

When I asked Mr. Shepherd Stonewhether he was not indirectly con­trolling the German press throughhis use of American money, heblandly assured me that he was, onthe contrary, making it "independ­ent." This "independence" perhapsexplains why the Frankfurter Rund­schau, which received a subsidy of amillion marks from Mr. Stone, rep­resents Senator McCarthy as a vil­lain and General MacArthur as a"demagogue," and has singularlyfailed to report the hearings of theMcCarran Committee's investigationof Communist influence on Ameri­can foreign policy.

Almost all German newspapersfear to incur the displeasure of theU. S. State Department. Mr. JohnPaton Davies, whom the McCarran

Committee charges with per-jury, istoday political adviser to the U. S.High Commissioner. It is thereforehardly surprising that the Germanpublic has been left in almost com­plete ignorance of the findings of theMcCarran Committee; listening tothe German radio and reading theU. S.-subsidized German press, oneGan still today hear the old, old storyabout those Chinese "agrarian re­formers." One radio commentator Iheard on July 25, a certain Dr.Werner Krug, told the Germans thatthe Communist danger in Asia wasnot one of armed force, but wassimply due to the refusal of theWestern powers to give up their im­perialist positions.

Which Way in Economics?

I t is in the realm of economicsand social policy, however, that Ger­mans in the American zone find ithardest to understand what is re­quired of them to win our confidence.We tell them that we believe in pri­vate enterprise, a free market, astable currency and a balancedbudget. We insist that they root outall vestiges of National Socialismby abolishing cartels and other re­straints on free competition designedto give security to either capitalistsor wage earners. One might there­fore expect that American authori­ties in Germany would congratulatethe Bonn government on the amaz­ing economic recovery which has re­sulted from the abolition of controlsand rationing, and the encourage­ment given to initiative, self-helpand hard· work by its economic andfinancial policies.

Instead, the 1951 "Annual Eco­nomic Review," issued by the Officeof Economic Affairs of the U. S.:High Commissioner, reproves theFederal government for not havingmade preparation "for investmentcontrols on a continuing basis," andfor its failure to pay serious atten­tion "to the problem of planningadequate standby controls." Thesame report complains that the Fed­eral Republic, although privilegedto obtain considerable informationconcerning "the control measureswhich had been established in theUnited States," has failed to insti­tute similar controIs in Germany.And on top of all this the High Com-

missioner's Office is now also tellingthe Germans that a little inflationwould not hurt them.

Can anyone wonder that the Ger­mans most anxious to do whatAmerica wants are a little confused?Is the hallmark of a good democratbelief in competitive free-enterpriseeconomics which have enabled WestGermany to stage an astounding re­covery in spite of the severe handi­caps constituted by dismantlement,continuing restrictions on produc­tion and research, and heavy occu­pation costs? Or must one believe ina controlled or state-directed econ­omy, to win American approval?Who represents America and Ameri­can public opinion? The New Dealerswho want Germany to copy Englandand who still occupy leading posi­tions in HICOM? Or the advocatesof free enterprise who also professto speak for America?

The agricultural section of the"Annual Economic Review for 1951,"published by the U. S. High Com­missioner, lists as a "shortcoming":

. . . protectionism in internationaltrade which shuts out competition,and "stabilizes" the market so as totake care of the least efficient pro­ducer.

Traveling in Germany, one canbut wonder what is meant by "leastefficient producer." Does it apply tothe industrial workers of the Ruhr'whose tiny backyards are green withvegetables in the late summer, or tothe other workers who, after theirlabors in factory or mine, spendtheir leisure hours cultivating allot­ments on the partly cleared areas ofbombed-out tenements? Does it ap­ply to the hard-working farmers ofLower Saxony and Bavaria, whom Ihave seen harvesting bountiful cropsof golden grain with scythes? Arethe men, women and children onesees working from dawn to dusk inthe beautiful countryside "inefficientproducers" because they lack ma­chinery and have only bullock orhorse-drawn carts to carry away thesheaves of corn? They look healthyand cheerful enough and probably donot know that the U. S. High Com­missioner disapproves of their ef­forts because they produce less "perman-hour" than the workers onAmerica's mechanized farms. Theyhave accomplished a near miracle inso increasing food production that

the Federal government's dollar im­ports of food have been reduced toonly a quarter of what was requiredin the first year of Marshall Planaid. Moreover, food in Germany ischeaper than in the United States.

Would West Germany have beenbetter advised to emulate socialistEngland, or chaotic France, whichdemand ever-increasing dollar sub­sidies instead of encouraging everyone to work and produce? Have thehard-working Germans made a mis­take in enabling their governmentto utilize its dollar aid on buyingraw materials for industry insteadof food, and thus decreasing bothunemployment and the need forAmerican subsidies?

In industry as in agriculturethere is a bewildering contradictionin Western allied policies. The U. S.High Commissioner's Economic Re­port shows that a shortage of steelis preventing full production in al­most every branch of heavy indus-

Foreign Trends

NATO HeadachesThe formidable Social Democraticsuccess in the recent German com­munal elections, no less decisive inCatholic Rhineland-Westphalia thanin Protestant Saxony, has addedpainfully to Europe's most excru­ciating headache: how to coax anincreasingly unwilling Germany intoa Continental defense system where,even (and particularly) if she wereto join it with enthusiasm, shewould be universally unwelcome. Ofsuch vicious paradoxes (discussed inthis department at greater length amonth ago) consists NATO.

How Europe's tortuous politicalstructure affects NATO's strategicspeculations has been privately ex­plained to a friend of mine byan understandably anonymous highNATO officer.

Germany, began the gentleman, isa member of the European DefenseCommunity but not a party to theAtlantic Treaty. Consequently, Ger­many is committed to fight if andwhen western Europe is attacked,but under no obligation if an attackoccurs elsewhere---in southeastern

try, from shipbuilding, automobilesand rolling stock to housing. Yet aslate as the second half of 1950, afterthe Korean war had begun, theBritish dynamited the greater partof the Salzgitter works which usedto produce steel from the phosphor­ous ores of Lower Saxony. Permis­sion has now been granted by OEECfor the reconstruction both of Salz­gitter and the Thyssen iron andsteel works in the Ruhr, ruthlesslydismantled by the British in 1948.But as a German popular song says:"Who will pay the bill; who has somuch money?"

The answer, one presumes, willbe the U. S. taxpayer. He has al­ready contributed millions throughECA and MSA to undo the damagedone by the dismantlement and "de­militarization" of German factories.He will pay again and again so longas U. S. policy continues to resem­ble the man who rode off rapidly inall directions.

Europe, for example. But Germanyis also to participate in the Euro­pean Army which, if it is ever en­gaged outside western Europe, wouldhave to do without the promisedGerman crack divisions. Whichmeans, in a realistic evaluation ofwestern Europe's non-German fight­ing potential, without much chance.

Germany's dual role in the Euro­pean defense system, he continued,focuses disturbingly on the likely as­sumption that a Soviet attack wouldfirst be centered on Yugoslavia. Inthat case NATO's High Commandcould not employ the EuropeanArmy's German divisions and, con­sequently, all would depend on Yugo­slavia's own performance. NATO, inother words, is a nonentity for allpractical purposes of a southeasternconflagration.

This puts all emphasis on the stra­tegic weight of Yugoslavia-theother NATO headache. Yugoslaviais under no N'ATO commitment atall, and Tito would avoid signingany kind of European defense treaty.The reasons for his coyness are ob-

DECEMBER 15, 1952 193

I Take an English Lesson

vious and they are indeed forbidding.For Yugoslavia, any close associa­

tion with NATO would mean thepresence of Allied troops and themodicum of economic cooperationneeded for common defense planning.And even if the Western powers hadno particular desire to do so, theexigencies of the situation wouldcompel them to press for changes inTito's totalitarian administration ofthe country's economy. Therefore, noNATO committments for Tito.

But how is NATO to make mili­tary sense if Germany must not becommitted to NATO intervention inYugoslavia, and Yugoslavia must notbe subjected to NATO disciplineanywhere? My friend's friend couldnot ,tell. Nor could he tell how theEuropean Army is ever to functionas an integrated body of fightingmen so long as the German govern­ment retains the right to withholdGerman contingents by unilateraldecision. And he had not the slight­est idea who was to have ultimateauthority over even such a paralyzedEuropean Army.

To' army graduates, this maysound merely like the conventionalmilitary snafu. But my informantdid not think so. He seemed well­nigh horrified by a situation forwhich no army had ever prepared aman: whenever a NATO officer triedto draw a chart of command (thealpha and omega of a staffer's exist­ence) , the darned thing came outlooking as if designed by Dali.

Pandit AttIee?

Pandit Nehru has not made muchprogress in converting Indian com­munism, but he has excellent chancesto take over the Socialist Interna­tional. The British Labor Party, atany rate, seems prepared to pay thestiffest price for close affiliation withthe Asiatic Socialist parties-even ifthat price were to include the Inter­national's official commitment to"neutrality" in the struggle betweenthe Soviets and the West.

The members of the "Asian So­cialist Convention" are gatheringnext January in Rangoon to bargainwith a "Fraternal Delegation" fromthe Socialist International, headedby Mr. Attlee himself. (The othertwo delegates are Guy Mollet fromFrance and K. Bjoerk from Hol-

194 THE FREEMAN

land.) Though Mr. Nehru is the un­disputed intellectual leader of the"Asian Socialist Convention," hedeems it advisable to let the repre­sentative of a smaller Asiatic power,U. Kyaw Nein of Burma, announcethe party line. This is it, as formu­lated at a recent meeting .of theConvention:

Both powers [Soviet Russia andthe U. S.] are cooing like doves buthold daggers in each hand. Americapersuades and cajoles governments,whether democratic or dictatorial, tojoin them in the name of democracy,while Soviet Russia also persuadesand threatens its satellites in thename of world peace to join hercamp....

The meeting postulated that a "thirdcamp" must be created, headed byAsia's Socialist Parties and forminga world-wide group of political

I was peaceably reading the Free­man when my wife recited a c1ose­clipped witticism from Henry Luce'sweekly pictorial; so I retaliated byrequesting that she read the firstparagraph of Mr. E. Dahlberg's"Second Harvest" which appealed tome as being witty and wise, par­ticularly as my personal opinion ofcompulsory education coincides withthat of Messrs. Emerson, Erasmusand Dahlberg, gentlemen of distin­guished opinions.

She handed my magazine backwithout even a smile. "Well," I said,"didn't you think it was good?"

"What I could understand of itwas," she replied.

"It's plain English," I protested."What didn't you understand?"

"I don't know; I can't even re­member what the words looked"like.People just don't use them."

Now I was so sure that Mr. Dahl­berg is people that I started read­ing, at random, what Emerson saidabout educating lunkheads. That wasplain, she' agreed. Then I read thatErasmus claimed there is no highereducation where popular educationprevails. I'd already indoctrinatedher that where learning is as com­mon as it is supposed to be today,and compulsory, the kids get theirminds furnished only "with bric-a-

forces "who might help to avert athird world war."

In organizational terms, Mr.Nehru's Convention threatens topromote a rival International, unlessthe European Socialist Parties arewilling to adopt Nehru's "neutral­ism." And such a split is preciselywhat Mr. Attlee and his colleagueshave resolved to prevent. Mr. Attleewould no doubt be rather pleased ifa "superior" decision of the Social­ist International allowed him to ac­cept Aneurin Bevan's anti-NATOplatform without making it appearthat Attlee has lost the intra-partywar at home. At any rate, he is saidto be going to Rangoon with a "com­promise" formula which, for allpractical purposes, would makeNehru's "neutralism" the officialpolicy of the Socialist International.

CANDIDE

brac and collectivistic cobwebs. Shethought Erasmus was smart to agreewith her.

Then I read what Dahlberg saidabout our universities which aim atsimian homogeneity.

"That's it!" she· exclaimed."Simian homogeneity?" I asked.

"What's wrong there?""I don't know what he means;

that's all that's wrong.""vVe take ho-mo-ge-nized milk," I

said; "you know, all alike, no cream.""Oh," she replied."And simian," I said. "That means

monkeylike; a simian is an ape.""Apelike sameness," she cogitated.

"That sounds all right. Why didn'the say so in the first place?"

"He did," I protested. "Lots ofpeople know what that means."

"Not us common people," shesnapped back. "They ought to writeit so a man could read it in his shirt­sleeves, if he wanted to, withoutbeing embarrassed."

Now Dahlberg I do not know; Ithink I'd like him, for in him I seemyself-my own weakness. We alltend to talk and write so that weunderstand what we have to say;but after all that is beside the point.There is no communication in talk­ing to ourselves.

MERCER H. PARKS

How the Income Tax Destroys YouBy HARLEY L. LUTZ

Ratification of the Sixteenth Amend­ment, relating to the income tax,opened a Pandora's Box of per­plexities, confusions and evils. Therehave been reams and volumes ofcourt decisions, Tax Court decisions,Treasury rulings, mimeographs, let­ters and regulations. These havebeen often inconsistent, sometimesunintelligible, and not infrequentlyillogical. There has been an insidioussapping of morale among both tax­payers and administrators whichhas culminated recently in shockingdisclosures of fraud and connivanceat tax evasion.

The Sixteenth Amendment con­tains neither definitions nor limita­tions. It authorizes the taxation ofincome but does not define income.It says nothing- about the rates oftax. When the resolution was beforethe Senate, Senator Bailey proposeda specific authorization of progres­sive tax rates but he later withdrewhis proposal on the ground that itsinclusion would almost certainly killthe chance of enactment and ratifi­cation. The vagueness of the lan­guage finally written, though properenough as a statement of Constitu­tional principle, assumed a protec­tion of taxpayers through Congres­sional benevolence, good will andunderstanding that has been mani­fest only when and as the ultimatelimits of the taxpayer's endurancehave been approached. And at suchtimes the sympathetic expressions ofconcern in Congressional committeereports·· come much too late.

Admittedly, the problems of de­termining income are formidable,far more so than was anticipated bythe Congressional and state legis­lators who drafted and ratified theAmendment. But the core of thegreatest evil and danger is the use,and abuse, of tax-rate progression.The progressive-tax principle is"built-in" socialism. The architectsof this principle were aggressiveand articulate, but in 1913 theyworked from a basis of romanticspeculation rather than from tested

A Professor Emeritus of Pub­lic Finance at Princeton Uni­versity points out the fallaciesin our income-tax rate scales,which he calls "a' product ofrule of thumb, guesswork,demagogic prejudice and needfor revenue.'" The middleclass, our national bulwark,is in greatest danger from pro­gressive tax rates, Dr. Lutzsays in this revealing article.

experience. To that time there hadbeen no application anywhere of theprogressive-tax principle except ona scale so limited and moderate asto afford no practical demonstrationof its destructive potential. In fact,ratification of the Amendment oc­curred only because of the strongassurances given that the rates ofincome tax, even though they mightbe progressive, would never exceeda very moderate level.

These assurance1s may have beenresponsible for the omission oflimits or restraints from the Amend­ment. The Constitution restricts thetaxing power at other points. Forexample, direct taxes must be appor­tioned according to population; alltaxes, imposts and excises must beuniform throughout the UnitedStates; and exports may not betaxed at all. It would have beenquite in order to modify the grantunder the Sixteenth Amendment bysetting a reasonable rate limit orsome other form of restriction as asafeguard against abuse. Experiencesince 1913 has shown that omissionof some kind of limit was a disas­trous oversight.

The iProgressive Tax in Theory

To understand what is wrongwith the progressive-tax principle,it is necessary to examine thetheories that have supported it.There are two such theories: 1)ability to pay, and 2) the equaliza-

tion of incomes. The first theory wasbeing developed and expounded bythe professors who were teachingeconomics in the colleges and gradu­ate schools when the writer was astudent; the second theory stemsfrom the "Communist Manifesto."

As the term "ability to pay" isused in taxation theory, it meansthe capacity to do things with in­come. It means the amount that onecan spend. Adam. Smith was one ofthe first writers to use the expres­sion. He said:1

The subjects of every state oughtto contribute toward the support ofthe government, as nearly as pos­sible, in proportion to their respec­tive abilities; that is, in proportionto the revenue which they respec­tively enjoy under the protection ofthe state [Italics supplied].

This language clearly recognizesthat the ability to use income, in­cluding the payment of taxes, isproportional to the income. So muchis demonstrated by observation andcommon sense. If A has an incomeof $5000 and B has an income of$10,000, B has twice as much abilityto spend as A has. It matters nothow or for what purposes A and Belect to spend their respective in­comes. B can spend two dollars forevery dollar that A can spend. ButB can not spend three or four timesas much as A in over-all. He maydecide to spend three or six timesas much as A on some particularitem, such as a radio, or a suit ofclothes, or a car. Nevertheless, forall purposes together B's total abil­ity to pay-or spend-is only doublethat of A. In short, ability is pro­portional to income, as Adam Smithrecognized.

These are the facts of life and ofthe market place. However, the in­come-tax rate scale is constructed ona different assumption, namely, thatability to apply income to the pay­ment of tax thereon increases fasterthan the income itself. The struc-

lAdam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations" (CannanEd.), p. 777

DECEMBER 15, 1952 195

ture of this rate scale is generallyfamiliar. For the year 1952, for ex­an1ple, the rate is 22.2 per cent onthe first $2000 of taxable income,24.6 per cent on the next $2000, 29per cent on the next $2000 and so onup to 92 per cent on all income above$200,000.

No advocate of progressive taxa­tion has ever been able to demon­strate just how much faster abilityis supposed to increase than income.There is no scientific basis for sucha demonstration. In the absence ofproof, or the possibility of proof,income-tax rate scales have been aproduct of rule of thumb, guess­work, demagogic prejudice and needfor revenue. Only a small proportionof the total number of income tax­payers would be exposed, in anycase, to the worst rigors of steepprogression, a circumstance thatprevents effective resistance to what­ever degree of extortion may bereached.

It is customary among the die­hard advocates of progression toemphasize the amount of income re­maining after tax as evidence of theability to pay whatever is levied.The fact that more remains out of alarge income, after tax, than out ofa small income, is regarded as con­clusive evidence of a progressivelygreater ability to pay. But there aredifferences in incomes, even withoutan income tax. These differencesspring from many factors in a free,private, capitalistic economic sys­tem. Except for the ,comparativelysmall part which consists of puremonopoly income-for which drastictaxation is not a proper or adequatecorrective-differences in incomeare stimulating and beneficial, con­ducive to far greater national prog­ress than would be achieved if allincomes were forcibly leveled out.

A Leaf from Karl Marx

The die-hard argument also neg­lects the need and importance ofsaving, which supplies the lifebloodof capital formation. One of theworst and most destructive featuresof our present practice of incometaxation is that it is a direct-andheavy-penalty on saving.

The "Communist Manifesto" con­tained a plank which demandedheavy graduated taxes on incomes

19 & THE FREEMAN

and inheritances. The particulargroup or class against which Marxdirected his attack was the bour­geoisie, or what we would call themiddle class. And it is precisely thisclass that is in greatest danger fromthe oppressive rates of income tax.For one thing, the tax penalizessaving, and it therefore crushes theincentives to thrift, self-support andeconomic independence. Marx real­ized that these qualities would cre­ate a :strong center of resistanceagainst his objective of reducing allpersons to a condition of completesubjection to, and dependence on,the government. It was thereforenecessary to destroy the middle class,and he made a wise choice of toolsfor this job in the progressive taxon incomes and inheritances.

The sharp advance of the tax rate

"The Ma,rxian logic. is clear, simpleand inexorable on this point: De­stroy, through heavily graduatedtaxation, the capacity and the in­centive to save and inves't, aud youcan eventually destroy the capitalistsystem."

"Every taxpayer is assumed to bea saint when making out his return• • • But after the return is filed heis assumed to be a sinner, an as­sumption p~obably based on pra,c­tical recognition of the temp'ta'tionto which an ilijudicious law hassubjected him."

scale through the lower taxable in­come brackets further emphasizesthe gravity of the attack on the mid­dle class. The rates applicable to in­comes in 1952 begin at 22.2 per centon the first $2000 of taxable incomeand rise to 92 per cent on such in­come over $200,000. On taxable in­come of $6000-$8000 the 1952 rateis 34 per cent, and on the incomebracket $14,000-$16,000 the rate is53 per cent. These are the marginalrates, applicable to any income fall­ing within the respective incomebrackets mentioned. A better meas­ure of the tax load is the effectiverate, wr.ich expressed the relation ofthe total tax to the total taxable in­come. At $6000 of taxable incomethe effective rate is 25 per cent; at$12,000 it is 31 per cent; and at

$24,000 it is 44.5 per cent. There hasbeen a lot of talk about the adverseeffect on the whole economy of a taxburden in excess of 25 per cent ofthe national income. ,Global prob­lems are important in their way;but why not, in addition to the at­tention we give to them, also givesome thought to what is happeningto those of our people who are strug­gling under a tax system that im­poses effective rates of the magni­tudes given above?

The Goa,l of Destruction

Strictly speaking, the Communist­Socialist goal is not equalization, butdestruction. The liquidation of themiddle class would be adequatelydone, however, if the middle andlarger incomes were to be whittleddown to a mediocre level, for thiswould deprive the expropriatedgroups of both the capacity and theincentive to save and to add to thenation's capital supply through in­vestment. We can still remember theboastful announcements of theBritish Socialists, while still inpower, regarding the success of theirincome-whittling measures. We haveyet to be shown that these policieshave had any other effect than to de­press further the already Spartanliving standards of the Britishpeople.

It was said above that we havetolerated the principle of progres­sive taxation for so long, despite itsevident excesses and destructive ef­fects, that it has become an articleof faith. There are hosts of well­meaning persons who accept thisarticle of faith but who are in nosense Communists or Socialists­who, in fact, abhor both of these"isms." The tragedy of their eco­nomic blindness is that they do notperceive the consequences of theiruncritical adherence to a major tenetof the party line. They are givingaid to those who would destroy usand they are betraying those who,by economic status and inclination,would be a national bulwark.

Many of these persons like to re­gard themselves as "liberals," evenif they are inexcusably hazy aboutthe meaning of this term or its his­torical perversion. But some of themhave a genuine humanitarian con­c.ern about the ills and problems en-

suing from low incolnes, bad livingconditions and ignorance.

Essentially, their "gripe"-to usean inelegant but forceful word-iswith the inequality of incomes. Theyhave accepted the income-levelingprocedure of progressive taxation asa corrective. This method will af­

ford a certain relief as long as thereis anything to level down. Rememberthe British orgy of free wigs, spec­tacles, dentures and pills. A familyrcan keep warm through one coldnight by burning down the house.But this is not a sensible way to getthrough a long, cold winter.

Cutting the Taproot

We should all be concerned aboutthe low incomes and bad living con­ditions of some of our people. Cor­rection of these conditions needsclear heads rather than demagogicmaudlinism, and we have had en­tirely too much of the latter. A lowincome denotes, ordinarily, smalleconomic capacity. Insofar as thiscondition involves deficiencies oftraining it is passed over here, notas unimportant but as a diversionfrom the main theme. The conditionof limited economic capacity stemsalso from lack of capital, that is,tools and equipment with which towork and produce. Even the workerwith small native talent can producemore, and earn more, if he has moreand better capital to work with andif the other workers in the vast com­plex of productive operations arelikewise better equipped. Capital canbe provided only by saving and in­vestment. And there can be savingand investment only if the tax sys­tem is so devised and applied as toleave individuals who have incomewith a sufficient capacity and incen­tive to save and invest part of it.

The progressive tax system strikesat this taproot of our well-being andprosperity. The Marxian logic isclear, simple, and inexorable on thispoint: Destroy, through heavilygraduated taxation, the capacity andthe incentive to save and invest, andyou can eventually destroy the capi­talist system.

A final matter to be dealt withhere may appropriately be intro­duced by some remarks of AdamSmith anent the practice of smug­gling, which in his time had been

raised to a high pitch of proficiency.2Smith said:

An injudicious tax offers a greattemptation to smuggling. But thepenalties of smuggling must rise inproportion to the temptation. Thelaw, contrary to all the ordinaryprinciples of justice, first creates thetemptation, and then punishes thosewho yield to it; and it commonly en­hances the punishment too in pro­portion to the very circumstancewhich ought certainly to alleviate it,the temptation to commit the crime.

For the eighteenth-century exciseswe can substitute the twentieth­century income tax, and Smith'scomments would apply perfectly. In­come-tax rates have been advancedto a level that offers a well-nigh ir­resistible temptation to get outfrom under, notwithstanding theheavy fines and long jail sentencesthat are inflicted upon those who arecaught. Few people realize, perhaps,that the tax-rate schedule of the in­dividual income tax in the RevenueAct of 1936 was almost identicalthroughout with the highest tax­rate schedule imposed during WorldWar 1. And since 1936 a successionof further rate increases have pro­duced today the heaviest income taxburden ever levied in our history.

The Jekyll-and-Hyde Theory

An injudicious excise offers agreat temptation to smuggling, andan injudicious income tax offers agreat temptation to evasion. Everytaxpayer is assumed to be a saintwhen making out his return, for heis allowed to do this all by himself,with only his conscience and hisbooks of account for company. Butafter the return is filed he is as­sumed to be a sinner, an assumptionprobably based on practical recogni­tion of the temptation to which aninjudicious law has subjected him.

Of course the taxpayers areneither all saints nor all sinners.The same can be said of the income­tax agents, examiners and other ad­ministrative officers who handle re­turns. However, the recent head­lines, indictments, resignations andlapses of memory on the witnessstand do indicate a substantial col­lapse of morale. It is so substantial,

21dem, p. 779aNational Tax Association, Proceedings of Thir­ty-fourth Annual Conference, 1941, p. 353

in fact, as to indicate a fairly pro­longed deterioration. As long ago as1941 Professor William A. Patonsaid in an address before the Na­tional Tax Association: 3

Accountants and taxpayers may bewrong, but I am giving it to youstraight from the shoulder when Isay that they almost unanimouslybelieve that they are being dealt withwith increasing unfairness and lackof good faith.

Professor Paton's statement wouldbe substantiated by many other ac­countants and by taxpayers. As heexplained later in the same address,there has been considerable reticenceabout what was going on because, inhis words, "they are fearful of re­prisal and they haven't any confi­dence in the higher-ups to protectthem" (i.e., if they were to complainor to expose the skulduggery).

It is most unlikely that the sourceof the unfairness and bad faithwould be among the rank and file ofagents and examiners. There had tobe a fountainhead higher up in theTreasury and the Bureau of InternalRevenue.. And there was, for per­sons in authority somewhere devisedand sanctioned such things as TD4422, the rating of field men by thevolume of back tax assessmentsturned in, and the high-handed, ar­bitrary treatment of taxpayers byinexperienced examiners with morezeal than understanding.

But normal men do not go off thedeep end en masse without a reason.There must be an ultimate source ofthe unfairness, bad faith, briberyand other demoralizing practicesthat have so widely characterized in­come-tax administration. This 'Sourceis the contempt in which taxpayersand administrators have come tohold a tax philosophy and a tax sys­tem that are essentially destructivein purpose and operation. Precedingloss of morale was loss of respect.

Devices such as reorganizing the'Bureau of Internal Revenue andde~

centralizing various audit and otheradministrative functions are casesof treating symptoms rather thancauses. The most important move,and one that will assuredly have last­ing beneficial. results, is to repudiatethe corruptive philosophy that under­lies progressive taxation and removethis Communist-inspired implementfrom the Federal tax structure.

DECEMBER 15, 1952 197

By TAYLOR CALDWELL

My War with the Reds

A well-known novelist tells how she wascourted by the Leit Wing, then attackedwhen she started to expose communism

It was not until I read Irene Kuhn'sarticle, "Why You Buy Books thatSell Communism," in the AmericanLegion Magazine for January 1951that what had been a profound, en­raging and baffling mystery to mesuddenly became quite clear. When Ifinally understood I was overwhelmedfor a little. Then I came out fight­ing, and the fight still goes on. AndI, being a Scotswoman, will neverstop the battle until it is won.

In 1933 my husband, Marcus Re­back, and I embarked on a novelabout the part munitions makersplay in the monstrous game of war.Both of us veterans of World War I,we had come to the conclusion thatwars are not merely "tragic blun­ders" or failures of human wisdom,but deliberately calculated engage­ments deliberately entered into, toconsume the vast glut of productsand goods turned out by the ma­chines of the industrial revolution,and to create a bogus prosperity.So we started the book-my husbanddoingalf .the background researchand I creating the "story line"­with high passion and indignation.The book was called "Dynasty ofDeath," and became an immediatebest-seller all over the world. It waspublished in 1938.

. I was young then, God forgive me,and flushed with enthusiasm andpassion; I believed that man was in­trinsically good, and that there wasa spiritual as well as physical evolu­tion in mankind, always progressing,as I artlessly called it, "upwards."Other books followed, always on thesame theme, and always ending on anote of hope-the hope that mansome day might be truly man, by hisown efforts and with the aid of God.

The American Communists, un­known to me, took tremendous in­terest in our books. But, to my con­fused dismay, I noticed that many

198 THE FREE:rtiAN

reviewers, mostly in New York, be­gan to harp on the "malefactors ofgreat wealth" and the "exploiters ofthe poor," whom they alleged to havefound in our books. They missed thecentral point, that men, whether richor poor, prominent or obscure,powerful or impotent in the affairsof the world, were equally respon­sible for the ills, guilts, sins, crimesagainst humanity, and the universalsuffering of man at the hands of hisfellow-man. This whole theme wasentirely overlooked, and now I kno\vit was deliberate. At any rate, myreviews in New York papers werealmost all approving. Until 1945.

While the books were moderatebest-sellers, the income from themwas almost entirely absorbed in in­come tax, constant illnesses in thefamily, operations, the support ofmany dependents, and charity. I hadgiven a solemn promise to God thatshould any of our books be publishedwe would give at least 30 per centof our income to charity, and wehave kept that promise through ris­ing and falling income. But all thisleft practically nothing for savings,nothing for travel or pleasure. Wewent to New York City very rarely,stayed at small hotels, never en­countered reviewers or the pressgenerally, and remained merely todiscuss forthcoming books with ourpublishers. Noone saw us or knewof us. I wish that were so now!

Propaganda Tide Rolls In

From 1938 to 1945, I receivedfloods of pamphlets and leaflets of avery radical and even communisticnature, all demanding contributions.I was so innocent, so unaware ofAmerican communism, that it wasonly by the mercy of God, duringthose years, that the conspiratorsdid not suck me into their whirlpool

of death. The literature was so noblein context, so high-minded, so per­meated with the "brotherhood ofman" that I was deeply moved. Ihanded it over to my husband, be­wailing the fact that we had nofunds to support these lovers of menin an era that was conspicuouslybarren of love.

Now, we live in the suburbs of asound and conservative and sensiblecity, Buffalo, N'. Y. Our two news­papers are, in the main, decentlyfair and constructive. Our public,private and parochial schools havealways been extremely individualis­tic, and have emphasized' Americanhistory and the duty of man to hisconscience and his fellows. Where,then, in such an environment, inwhich I have spent all but six yearsof my life, would I encounter com­munism, or know anything about it?

But my husband had encounteredit as a government officer. He had,unknown to me, made a profoundstudy of the inroads of communismin this Republic. He could spot allthe sinister propaganda. So when Iturned over to him the floods of lit­erature I had been receiving, he wasaghast. He warned me never to re­ply to it; he showed me the areas ofdisease in the pamphlets and theleaflets and the torrents of letters.He became more and more appalledas he read,almost daily, the vilestuff that poured into our house."So, it is here at last," he said."They know you have one access tothe means of public communication,and they are after you, to use you."He was stunned to see the names ofprominent people on the mastheadsof the letters, names closely con- .nected with Mr. Roosevelt and hisclose associates. "They either do notknow, which is very bad, or they doknow, which is terrifying," he said.

All this foul stuff had somethingin common: a curious uniformity ofcontext, right out of Marx andStalin. "The People's Revolution,"was used constantly. "The Rise ofthe Common Man" was a recurringphrase. "Our Noble Ally, Russia,"was employed monotonously. "Agrar­ian Reformers" anent Chinese Com­munists was routine. Pamphletsshowing happy Russians plowing andworking and grinning, "releasedfrom bondage," were so usual thatmy husband began to suspect that

these many organizations were ex­changing photographs and pressagents and writers. We threw thewhole litter away with repugnance.And my husband began to point outto me that Roosevelt, the Groton andHarvard graduate, was being "used"by sinister forces to advance thecause of communism in America. Ibegan to see the new exploitation,degradation and oppression beingvisited on the middle class ofAmerica, and I could see that it hadonly one object: the destruction ofthe only fortress against totalitar­ianism. However, my husband and Ibelieved that the American .peoplewere sound enough not to be seducedby this foreign ideology. Until 1946.

Penthouse Bolshevism

In 1946, we had our first, and last,great financial success. We unearthedan old manuscript, "This Side of In­nocence," which had been repeatedlyrejected. This book became enor­mously popular, and was sold to amovie company. The officers of thiscompany told us that ,ve had not ex­perienced much success before be­cause we had not as yet met "theimportant people in New York." Wedid not know columnists or reportersand other newspaper people. We didnot know "the people who are doing'things' in New York." We "de­served" to be "known." Only tooanxious to see and be seen, my hus­band borrowed on his life insuranceand took our very small savings, andwe embarked for New York to meetall these interesting folk who coulddo so much for us. I had a fur coatfor the first time in my life, and myhusband invested in his first tuxedo.

The movie people were honestlyanxious to have us meet newspaperand other people, to advance pub­licity on "This Side of Innocence,"and to establish good public rela­tions. They had a huge stake in thebook and naturally wished it to payoff. It was not their fault that amongthe press were a large number ofradicals, Communists and fellow­travelers. They gave innumerablecocktail parties for us; arrangedmany interviews, called in pressphotographers, wrote articles aboutus. We whirled from New York toWashington to Philadelphia and backagain. We were on. the radio, and we

gave talks. We looked at everythingjoyfully, believing our ship had fi­nally come in.

It did. And it flew the Red flag.I am not a tactful or diplomatic

person. I accepted invitations to pri­vate parties, for in those days Iloved people. One was given for meby a wealthy "liberal" woman onPark Avenue, who owned a numberof enterprises. There were so manyparties that now they have 'becomean exhausted blur in my mind: hotelrooms, taxis, perfume, reporters,flash-bulbs, friendly folks - andadroit questioning. It was not untilseveral months and at least one hun­dred parties later that we began tosee a curious pattern emerging fromthe welter. We discovered that our

"All These Interesting Folk."

closest questioners were .men andwomen with radical convictions. Wediscovered that some of the writerswe met were vehement on "the com­ing dawn of a new social era."

My husband, deeply alarmed now,urged me not to talk to these p,eople.But I am a fighter by nature, and Igave these people the emphatic newsthat I was not a Communist, a radi­cal, a "liberal," or any other traveler.I informed them that my husbandand I were about to embark on acampaign, via books and letters andradio, against communism. I told re­porters that these things were loath­some to me, and that what I coulddo I would do to enlighten the Amer­ican people about the enemy in theirmidst. We stopped going to N'ewYork for parties, and got down tothe hardest work of our lives.

Then the roof fell in on us. Butbefore that we moved in on the fightwith a book about the sound princi­ples of tbe middle class, based on,Aristotle's remark that this classwas the backbone of a nation. I paidclose attention to my mail. I pickedout the Communist letters and wroteangry letters in reply, denouncingthe writers and threatening to ex­pose them for what they were. Someof them replied, scorning me for be­ing a deluded fool for believing inRussian slave-labor camps,and "allthe other lying tales of interestedparties." Armed with facts aboutSoviet Russia, I gave a few talks tostudents and teachers and in returnI received scores of anonymous andobscene letters filled with snidethreats and ridicule. (These camefrom all over the country.) I wroteletters to editors of newspapers, tothe various public columns, courage­ously but foolishly giving my name,and attacked socialism, communismand all forms of radicalism.

lVly mail began to fill rapidly withshameful attacks on me, and onenewspaper (horrifyingly not aNewYork newspaper) devoted its wholecorrespondence section to assaultson me as a writer and a woman anda person. I offered articles exposingcommunism to various nationalmagazines, and they were uniformlyrejected. One editor wrote me: "TheAnlerican people are not sympatheticto your views, and they believe thatRussia was not only our ally in thepast war but that we'll be able tocooperate with her in the new freeworld."

Then we knew that the mortaldisease of communism had brokenout all over America.

Many New York critics, acceptingmy challenge, moved in on me. Allour books have been tales of the riseof the great industries in America,with the exception of two historicalstories, one of which was "The Earthis The Lord's," an account of ,Gen­ghis Khan who, I implied, was aforerunner of Stalin. The books havea masculine flavor, for my husbanddoes all the background work andresearch, and writes the more diffi­cult, technical and business passages.At no time have I ever written a"sexy" book, or a so-called "woman'sbook." At no time have 1 ever usedprofane or obscene terms or situa-

DECEMBER 15, 1952 199

Today I praise all idle valiant thingsThat will not wholly bend to man's dull way:Oceans that rise upon the clouds for wings,Lightly to drift in sun-tranced holiday;The joyous flowers that create the seedOut of the rich insouciance of bloom;The birds, beyond all reason and all need,Loving the sound of song, the hue of plume.I praise today all lovers who declareThat the embrace is greater than the child;I praise God's lightnings striding down the air­Useless and beautiful and swift and wild.I praise all idle valiant things: I praiseThe life-sustaining suns that merely blaze.

E. MERRILL ROOT

tions. Over 65 per cent of my fanmail has come from men, from la­borers to famous musicians, fromclerks to Senators, from plumbers todoctors, and this mail has arrivedfrom every corner of the world aswell as from America.

"Liberal" Smear Campaign

But the New York critics ignoredall this. They called me an insignifi­cant "popular" novelist, and usedthe most abusive and sneeringterms. They called me -"the darlingof the women's magazines," thoughI have never written directly forany magazine. They referred to "ob­scene language" in the books, whichwas a great surprise to me. Theyshouted vehemently that I was not a"serious" writer, that I was a "re­actionary," and that my "notions"go back to Grover Cleveland. Theywrote lying and ridiculous reportsof me, and even .published absurdand humiliating interviews with me,interviews which had never takenplace. One magazine, a weekly peri­odical, then edited by a notoriousand since exposed Communist, wrotesuch a disgusting story about methat I was advised to sue the editors.I am sorry that I did not.

Now a whole national patternemerged, curious in its uniformity.Our books were dismissed with afew ridiculing words, not only inN'ew York but in many other cities.A rumor was spread that I was afat, white-haired old harridan ofimmense greed, and so well did ittake hold that many people, meetingme for the first time, were aston­ished to discover that it was untrue.

I was laughed at for "writingtingling sex-stories for the delightof ignorant housewives." One of ourbooks was reviewed by a critic whois now in jail for refusing to answerwhether or not he is or was a Com­munist. His review was so outrage­ous that I protested to the editor ofthe book review section, who wroteme an odd letter: "If you wrote'War And Peace' tomorrow, or anyother epic, we'd give you no creditfor it. Please don't ask me why."

My first fur coat, bought in 1944,was a rather cheap mink. I was in­nocently proud of it. A story ap­peared about my "luxurious minks,"a story calculated to arouse the envy

200 THE FREEMAN

and ire of the proletariat. My hus­band turned in my engagement ringand bought a little larger diamond.My "jewels" became the subject ofa whole derisive article. My childrenbecame the objects of jeering com­ments. One teacher attacked myyounger daughter for her "ana­chronistic" ideas, and called the lit­tle one "an enemy of the people."All this was the result of the viciousarticles, syndicated throughout thenation. Several critics bewailed my"pile," which is non-existent and notto be compared with the income of,for example, Pearl Buck.

But I was still bewildered. I didnot know that I was the victim of adefinite Communist attack, wellthought out and organized. My hus­band had his suspicions, however.In 1949 we talked with a friend, aman prominent in public relations.He hesitated at first to enlighten us.Finally he said: "They are out toget you and ruin you, for you don'twrite novels full of communist andsocialist ideology, and you don'twrite books about 'sensitive' youngmen in revolt against bourgeois so­ciety, or sharecroppers or exploitedworkers or tortured Negroes andpiteous degenerates who are victimsof the 'System.' But most of all theyare out to get you because they sayyou are a 'reactionary,' a Republicanand an enemy of Russia."

A number of writers of both booksand magazine articles have confessedto me that they do not dare to attackthe horror in our midst, for fear ofreprisals such as have been visitedupon me. Some of them, good

Praise of Idle Things

friends, have anxiously urged me toconfine my material to innocuousrnatter, if I am to survive as a writerand have enough money on which toeat. They have expressed their fearsthat America is incurably sick andthat nothing can save her, least ofall, novelists. They call to my atten­tion that we have no other incomebut from writing, and that I am injeopardy now. With kind brutality,they ask me to consider the fact thatI am now middle-aged, ill, and wornout with fighting, and that I mustthink about my family.

I did consider all these things,. andwas prepared, in despair, to sur­render until I read Irene Kuhn's ar­ticle. Then I knew that nothing inGod's' world was going to keep mefrom fighting for America. I beg myfellow-writers to join the battle. Ifwe do not win, all of us, then therecan be no writers in the future, ex­cept those subsidized by a slaveState, and there will be nothingworth living for, anywhere, for any­one.

This might be significant: Ourpu~lisher did a great deal of pre­publication publicity on the subjectmatter of our last novel, "The Devil'sAdvocate," which is about commu­nism in America in 1970. Prior topublication, in April of this year,we received three mysterious tele­phone calls from Washington, threat­ening us that if we allowed the· bookto be published we would be"framed" by some Bureau or other.We went on with the publication. Ifwe are deliberately ruined, and evenif we lack bread, we'll fight on!

By ALICE WIDENER

The UN's Welfare Czar

In this fourth article of a series onthe UiN, the author reveals thalt itsprogram of aid to underdevelopedcountries has, with the aid of theU. S. delegation,heen placed underthe dictatorial authority of an of­ficial in whose UN division therehas heen an alarming infiltrationof American iCommunis,ts.

On November 15, 1952, Dr. Benja­min Cohen, a Chilean who is Assist­ant Secretary-General of the UnitedNations Department of Public In­formation declared:

Political problenls have over­shadowed United Nations publicity,but the most important work doneby the United Nations itself is trulyto be found in the field of economicand social problems, and in the free­dom and progress of non-selfgovern­ing peoples.

This important statement presentsin a nutshell the basic fact aboutthe United Nations today: The Ko­rean War has made it clear that theorganization is unable to carry outits primary original purpose of main­taining and promoting peace; there­fore the UN has been forced to shiftits main activities away fronl politi­cal planning and over to planning foreconomic-social welfare.

A month after the war started,the UN adopted a multi-million dol­lar Expanded Program of TechnicalAssistance for Underprivileged Na­tions and set up a Technical Assist­ance Board to coordinate it. How­ever, no official body of the UN haseven given a clear definition of theterm "underdeveloped." The UnitedStates has paid 60 per cent of the$39 million already contributed forthe Expanded Program; the SovietUnion pays nothing. At the NewYork Herald Tribune Forum, Octo­ber 1952, UN Secretary-GeneralTrygve Lie advocated a billion-dollaryearly budget for the UN programof economic development.

The voting members of the Tech­nical Assistance Board were and are

now: a representative from the UI~

Technical Assistance Administrationand representatives of five special­ized international agencies - theFood and Agriculture Organization,the International Labor Organization,the UN Educational, Scientific andCultural Organization (UNESCO) ,the vVorld Health Organization andthe International Civil Aviation Or­ganization. In addition, non-votingobservers fronl the InternationalMonetary Fund and the InternationalBank for Reconstruction and De­velopment were invited to attendmeetings of the Technical Assist­ance Board and to cooperate withits work. Also in July 1950, UN Sec­retary-General Lie asked DavidOwen, a British subject who is As­sistant Secretary-General in chargeof the UN Department of EconomicAffairs, to serve as acting chairmanof the Technical Assistant Board.

This executive body was obligedby Resolution 222A (IX) of the UNEconomic and Social Council toreach all decisions on the basis ofunanimity. In other words, the Boardwas prevented from taking any ac­tion for aid to underdeveloped na­tions without the unanimous consentof its members. Thus the Board­like the UN Security Council-washamstrung from the beginning byan undemocratic voting procedurebased on an absolutist theory origi­nally forced on the UN by the So­viet Union.

Unanimous Disagreement

After less than a year, it becameplain to everyone concerned withthe Expanded Program that rivalry,jealousy and differences of opinionamong the agencies belonging to theTechnical Assistance Board pre­vented it from reaching importantdecisions unanimously. Thus theBoard found it virtually impossibleto function, and most of the fundsfor the Expanded Program remainedunspent. It therefore became neces­sary for the Economic and Social

Council to revise the Board's votingprocedure and improve its executiveset-up. The Secretary-General's Ad­ministrative Coordinating Commit­tee suggested to the Economic andSocial Council's standing TechnicalA.ssistance Committee that it estab­lish a "Working Party" to examinethe situation and make a report.

On May 22-23, 1952, the Techni­cal Assistance Committee met todiscuss the Working Party Report.Several of its recommendations wereadopted without much discussion,but some of them caused a heateddebate in which eight nations­China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Mexico,Pakistan, the Philippines and Uru­guay-were opposed by France, Can­ada, the United Kingdom and theUnited States. In all the complicatedhistory of the UN' debating society,no other discussion better illustrateswhat are some of the real dangersto freedom in the UN, and howweak, socialist-minded Americanleadership in that organization hasintensified these dangers.

Power Without Stint or Limit

The first objection raised by theeight dissenting nations concerneda proposal to give the UN TechnicalAssistance Board a powerful full­time Executive Chairman withoutsetting a ti11~e limit on his tenureof office.

Cuba, under the distinguishedleadership of Mr. Perez Cisneros,advocated the wise provision: "Theappointment [of the ExecutiveChairman] shall be for a term of... years. An incumbent may be re­appointed." This was strongly sup­ported by seven other countries. ButIsador Lubin, a member of the U. s.Mission to the UN, who has con­tributed to Socialist publications,stated that in the opinion of theU. S. Delegation the Chairman'sterm of office should be fixed bySecretary-General Lie who "pre­sumably" would consult with theheads of the specialized agenciesconcerning suitable candidates andother matters. According to the of­ficial rapporteur (UN DocumentE/TAC/Sr. 23) Mr. Lubin said that"while he could not recall a particu­lar example, there were undoubtedlyprecedents for creating posts with­out specifying the term of office."

DECEMBER 15,1952 201

A second objection raised by theeight dissenting nations concernedthe first sentence of a paragraphdealing with the proposed votingprocedure for the Technical Assist­ance Board:

Decisions relative to recommenda­tions or proposals of the ExecutiveChairman or made by members ofthe Board will normally be taken bygeneral agreement between the Ex­ecutive Chairman and all membersof the Board.

Mr. Cisneros immediately pointedout: "This sentence is both a state­ment of fact and the expression of awish."

A third and even more serious ob­jection concerned the following para­graph:

When general agreement can notbe reached, recommendations or pro­posals shall be considered approvedwhen a majority of the members ofthe Board present and voting andthe Executive Chairman are inagreement. If no agreement can bereached, the matter may be referredto the Technical Assistance Commit­tee either by a majority of the mem­bers of the Board present and votingor by the Executive Chairman.

This arrangement was variouslydenounced by Mr. Fabregat of Uru­guay, Mr. Cha of China, Mr. Hasanof Pakistan, Mr. Garcia of thePhilippines, Mr. Abdoh of Iran, Mr.Pharaony of Egypt and Mr. Goro­stiza of Mexico as giving the Chair­man such extensive povyers that "Hewould be in a position to take arbi­trary action and to supplant theBoard itself"; also as granting theChairman "powers without limita­tions."

Apparently inspired by Americanleadership, the French, Canadianand British representatives in theTechnical Assistance Committee triedto overcome all opposition. A dele­gate from one of the eight objectingnations recently told this writer:"Holding on for dear life to theprinciples of freedom and demo­cratic procedure, we eight small na­tions were struggling in high seas.But the United States delegationkept on pushing our heads under thewater."

Handicapped, the eight nationsfinally agreed to endorse a TechnicalAssistance Committee report em­bodying recommendations to theEconomic and Social Council, but

202 THE FREED,fAN

reserved their right to present to itstrong objections to those provisionsrelating to the powers of the Execu­tive Chairman and the voting pro­cedure of the TAB.

A former executive vice-presidentof a great American internationalbusiness corporation has carefullyexamined the debated provisions andcommented as follows: "It can beinterpreted that the Executive Chair­man has the power-in reporting tothe Technical Assistance Committee-to ignore the Board. A completeanalysis of this thing would requiresome pretty good legal talent. Butthe over-all impression is that thelanguage is in such general termsthat it doesn't make the Chairman'sconsultation with the Board manda­tory. In American business, underthe balance of power system, a ma­j ority of the Board can overrule theChairman. The document talks about'members present and voting' butdoesn't say anything about a quor­um. In the absence of a quorum, dodecisions go by default to the Chair­man? The whole matter of arrivingat decisions through democraticprocess is involved. Under certaininterpretations of this document,the powers of the Chairman wouldappear to be excessive."

Mr. Lie Jumps the Gun

A meeting of the Economic andSocial Council was scheduled to beheld on Wednesday June 11, 1952 at10 :30 A.M. to discuss the TechnicalAssistance Committee report on thereorganization of the Technical As­sistance Board and the proposedfunctions of its Executive Chairman.But on June 10, to the consternationof the dissenting nations, there ap­peared on the front page of the NewYork Times a report by its UN cor­respondent, Thomas J. Hamilton:

David Owen, Assistant Secretary­General of the United Nations forEconomic Affairs, has accepted ap­pointment as Executive Chairmanof the United Nations Technical As­sistance Board. [Italics added.]

Thus the eight nations learnedthat instead of debating a proposalon the morrow, they would merelybe discussing a fait accompli. Im­mediately, some of them let theiroutraged feelings be known to theAdministration.

When the Economic and SocialCouncil met the next morning, theChairman of the Technical Assist­ance Committee-Mr. de Seynes ofFrance-opened the discussion witha statement that the appointment ofa full-time Executive Chairman forthe Technical Assistance Boardwould strengthen the whole .set-upof the Expanded Program. He saidhe wished to stress that point "par­ticularly because a certain news­paper, normally exceptionally ac­curate in its presentation of news,had the previous day published anarticle referring to decisions whichhad not yet been made and adoptedby the Council, including commentson the relationship between theChairman of the Board and therepresentatives of the specializedagencies, which were quite fantasticand unworthy of a journalistac­credited to the United Nations."

This bitter attack on Mr. Hamil­ton was virtually unprecedented inthe annals of the UN. Possibly itwas justified, but there is almost in­controvertible evidence to the con­trary. The official United NationsBulletin of June 15 carries on itsfirst page the heading "A Fort­nightly Review" under which is thebracketed statement: "Covering theperiod May 30 to June 9." Para­graph three, under the caption "NewTAB Chairman," states:

The growing importance and com­plexity of technical assistance ac­tivities has resulted in an interestingdevelopment on June 11, the appoint­ment of a full-time chairman of theTechnical Assistance Board. . . . Tothis position, the Secretary-General[Trygve Lie] has appointed Mr.David Owen ...

Thus-when covering the periodMay 30 to June 9, 1952-the UnitedNations Bulletin editors announceda major decision by the Economicand Social Council supposedly ar­rived at on June 11.

Further evidence of Mr. Hamil­ton's accuracy is revealed in the Eco­nomic and Social Council's officialrecord. For immediately after hav­ing attacked him, Chairman deSeynes ceded the floor to MartinHill of the UN Secretariat who,speaking for Trygve Lie, made whatin the circumstances sounded like apost factum proposal for Mr. Owen'sappointment, explaining that it had

been unanimously agreed "that thebest person for the task of Execu­tive Chairman for the Technical As­sistance Board was Mr. Owen." Mr.Hill then quoted Mr. Lie as saying:"I would not at this time propose toset any term to this arrangement."

Thus the eight dissenting nationswere put in a position which one oftheir representatives has describedas follows: "There is an enormousdifference between discussing im­personally the powers of a vacantChair, and discussing on a highlyembarrassing personal basis a Chairwith a man sitting on it. This isespecially true in a case where thesitter happens to be a close associateand high-ranking official of an inter­national body to which the debatersbelong."

That the point was well taken isproved by the remark of Mr. vVoul­broun, the Belgian representative,at the meeting of June 11, thatCuba's proposed time limit on theExecutive Chairman's tenure of of­fice "might give the impression· thatthe Council did not have full confi­dence in the Executive Chairman."

A Chairman-and a Record

When the Council reconvened onthe afternoon of June 11, there waslittle the eight dissenting membersof the Technical Assistance Commit­tee could do except diplomatically tocongratulate Mr. David Owen and toreiterate their objections to dicta­torial powers as a matter of princi­ple "in the United Nations or any­where else." Mr. Fabregat of Uru­guay said:

The powers vested in the Execu­tive Chairman would amount to aveto. Criticism of that procedure hadbeen raised in connection with otherUnited Nations organs and he sawno reason for extending such a mani­festly unsatisfactory arrangement.

Despite this, Mr. Owen's appoint­ment was confirmed; the ExecutiveChairman's tenure of office withoutlimit was adopted by 8 votes to 3,with 7 abstentions; the voting pro­cedure for the Board was adoptedby 11 votes to none, with '7 absten­tions. Then the whole matter wasincorporated into an Economic andSocial Council Report which, as thisis written, is under considerationfor adoption by the U'N General As-

sembly. On pages 50 and 51 of thisReport there is a summary of thelegal documents involved, which re­liable sources have said is mislead­ing and inaccurate. Interested mem­bers of the Assembly might do wellto compare the summary with thelegal documents.

On November 12, 1952, accordingto the New York Times, DavidOwen reported to the Assemblythat:

United Nations technical assistanceprograms list 956 experts at work inmore than sixty countries. . . .

In addition to sending expertsabroad, the United Nations, underits fellowship programs, is training869 leaders from fifty countries inthe institutes and agencies of forty­five countries, Mr. Owen said ... henoted that the world organizationhad recruited 1,598 experts from anenormous range of countries and hadprovided fellowship training for2,697 professional men and women.

This represents "a great cross­fertilization of the technical ideasand skills of the world," lYlr. Owensaid.... Requests for 1953 will totalabout $38,000,000, he continued....

In view of Mr. Owen's record dur­ing 1946-1952 as head of UN Eco­nomic Affairs-during which time ahard core of alleged pro-Commu­nists, Communists and/or espionageagents penetrated his departmentand held important positions withinit, Americans should watch closelythe UN's Expanded Program ofTechnical Assistance.

Delegates to the current GeneralAssembly have expressed stern criti­cism of it. Mrs. Lindstrom (Swe­den) said her delegation "did notbelieve that the Technical AssistanceBoard was using the most efficientand rational methods in the selec­tion of experts." It also appeared,she said, that social affairs expertswere recruited "on the basis of per­sonal interviews" and not on thebasis of consultation with govern­ments.

In this connection it might be re­membered that David Owen sentOwen Lattimore to Afghanistan asChief of the UN Technical Assist­ance Mission in 1950 partly on thebasis of a personal interview at aUN luncheon.

Mr. Lee of China asked what isreally holding up the rapid economicprogress which the underdevelopednations desire, and said: "The ,an-

swer is . . . well understood by thecommon man. It is .the threat ofCommunist aggression and infiltra­tion."

Mr. Abdullah Baqr (Iraq) said:"It is regrettable that some of themost responsible officials of thoseadministering technical assistance inthe United Nations are being influ­enced in their judgments by precon­ceived ideas."

A Potential Red Network

A former high official of the U. S.government, who rendered invalu­able service to our country in WorldWars I and II, has studied the majordocuments relating to the UN Tech­nical Assistance Board and hasstated:

They raise the question as to whatthe position of the free world wouldbe if the Executive Chairman wereto fall under the control of subver­sive elements, or, if key positions inhis organization, with or without hisknowledge and acquiescence, shouldbe occupied by Communists.

The Senate Internal Security sub­committee, with the aid of the ablelegal counsel of Mr. Robert Morris,called to the witness stand a numberof American citizens occupying keypositions under David Owen. Prac­tically all of them refused to answerwhether they have been or are mem­bers of the Communist Party on thegrounds of self-incrimination.

A man who is surrounded by al­leged Communists or pro-Commu­nists in key positions in his organi­zation and either does not know itor does not recognize the hazard, is110 man to entrust with exceptionalpowers and vast sums of money andwith the power to select technicalpersonnel and send missions withdiplomatic imlnunity to all countriesof the world.

In line with his present duties,David Owen holds regular monthlymeetings with the Director-Generalof the UN Technical Assistance Ad­ministration, the. President of theInternational Bank for Reconstruc­tion and Development, and the Man­aging Director of the InternationalMonetary Fund. According to in­formed sources, this last organiza­tion apparently has been and is nowseriously infiltrated with Americansubversive elements. For example,its Secretary, Frank V. Coe, is de­scribed in the Senate Judiciary Com­mittee report on the Institute ofPacific Relations as having "collab-

DECEMBER 15, 1952 203

By c. P. IVES

Harold Laski's Successor

orated with agents of the Soviet In­telligence apparatus as shown bysworn testimony" and as havingbeen "identified as a member of theCommunist Party by one or moreduly sworn witnesses."

Several logical conclusions may bedrawn from consideration of theUN's Expanded Program of Techni­cal Assistance, and from the presentset-up of the Technical AssistanceBoard under Mr. Owen's ExecutiveChairmanship. First: Under no cir­cumstances should the new Congressconsent to the integration of theU. S. Point Four Program with the

On March 6, 1951, Professor MichaelOakeshott delivered· his inaugurallecture at the School of Economicsand Political Science of the Univer­sity of London (LSE) as successorto Harold J. Laski in the chair ofpolitical science. At once a high pealof agony and of anger rang out fromone of the great pundits of theBritish left and in the famous jour­nal where the Marxoidal punditryof Britain officially cerebrates. Thepundit was the redoubtable RichardH. S. Crossman, the journal was theNew Statesman and Nation; andboth ,Mr. Crossman and his paperhad a point.

For had the managers of theSchool searched the whole wideworld for a man polar to Laski intemperament, in teaching, in in­stinct and sympathy (which perhapsthey did) they could not have foundone better fitting the specifications.In calling Mr. Oakeshott (he hadbeen lecturer in history in the Uni­versity of Cambridge) they seemedto be doing their best to proclaimthe end of the age of Laski at theLSE.

In this way the appointment ofMr. Oakeshott has a meaning notmerely for the British academiccommunity but for English-speakingpeople everywhere. For the profes­~orship of political science at theLondon School of Economics is one

204 THE FREEMAN

UN's Technical Assistance Program,as the late General Counsel of theUN, Dr. Abraham H. Feller, andprominent Truman Administrationleaders have advised. Second: Sincethe U. S. puts up 60 per cent of themoney for the UN's program, theU. S. Delegation should urge theGeneral Assembly to reexamine thematter of Mr. Owen's chairmanshipand the powers of the Technical As­sistance Board. Third: Congressshould continue the investigation ofAmerican personnel in the UN Sec­retariat begun by the Senate Sub­committee on Internal Security.

of the most influential academicposts in the English-speaking world.In his early days Laski was a liberaland a pluralist and not even in thetime of his maturity was he a Stalin­ist. But from the London School ofEconomics both ex cathedra and inincessant missionary forays Laskiacted for many years as Marxoidevangel-in-chief to all the landswhere "Capital" is read in English.

But if the nevv professor of po­litical science at the London Schoolof Economics is unlike Laski and ifthe unlikeness earns the disappro­bation of Laski's admirers, whatkind of man is the new professor,and what kind of politics does heteach?

Mr. Oakeshott's inaugural lecturewas, quite appropriately, on "Po­litical Education." Perhaps the coreparagraph in the lecture, and possi­bly the one that offended the Laski­ites most was this:

What has to be learned (in politi­cal education) is not an abstractidea, of a set of tricks, not even aritual, but a concrete, coherent man­ner of living in all its intricateness.It is clear, then, that we must notentertain the hope of acquiring thisdifficult understanding by easy meth­ods. Though the knowledge we seekis municipal, not universal, there isno short cut to it. Moreover, politicaleducation is not merely a matter ofcoming to understand a tradition, itis learning how to participate in a

conversation: it is at once initiationinto an inheritance in which we havea life interest, and the explorationof its intimations.

Now American readers familiarwith some of the less formal dis­quisitions on political theory inBritain will at least think they rec­ognize overtones there. They seemto hear a modern restatement ofsomething very much like EdmundBurke's idea of the body politic asprecisely that-a body, an organism,in which the past and the presentand intimations of the future areall together in one "great mys­terious incorporation of the humanrace...."

This incorporation, moreover, isnot inverted, it has grown out ofman's nature. It can not be invented;it must grow out of nature and tra­dition. Burke warned that:

All your sophisters can not pro­duce anything better adapted to pre­serve a rational and nlanly freedomthan the course that we (the Eng­lish) have pursued, who have chosenour nature rather than our specula­tions, our breasts rather than ourinventions, for the great conserva­tories of our rights and privileges.

This is from the passage in "TheFrench Revolution" which, perhapsas well as any other, summarizesBurke. It will turn the Americanreader to the Oakeshott essay whichseems, as much as ,any, to buttress,complement and clarify the some­times understated and frequentlyovercompressed text of the Oake­shott Inaugural Lecture. This essayis the two-part discussion called"Rationalism in Politics" whichProfessor Oakeshott published inthe Cambridge Journal of Novemberand December 1947.

On Political Knowledge

In this compelling paper, he brokepolitical knowledge into two cate­gories. "The first sort of knowledgeI will call technical knowledge, theknowledge of technique. . . . It ispossible to write down technicalknowledge in a book. . . ." The tech­nical knowledge of politics writtendown in a book becomes an ideology.

The second sort of knowledge,I call practical because it exists

only in practise, is not reflective and(unlike technique) can not be for­mulated in rules. This does not

This Is What They Said

n1ean, however, that it is an esotericsort of knowledge. It means onlythat the method by which it may beshared and becomes common knowl­edge is not the method of formula­tion doctrine.

And if we consider it from thispoint of view, it would not, I think,be misleading to speak of it as tra­ditional knowledge. In every activityof man this sort of knowledge is alsoinvolved; the mastery of any skill,the pursuit of any concrete activityis impossible without it.

I have italicized the last wordsbecause it is just here that Profes­sor Oakeshott seems to me to secedefrom the fashionable consensuswhich Laski and Crossman symbolizeand which has so long and so ruin­ously dominated the intellectual lifeof· the West.

Sappers of Western Culture

For unlike Oakeshott, Oakeshott'sRationalists (and Burke's sophis­ters) insist that concrete politicalactivity is possible without "tradi­tional knowledge." Indeed tradition,they say, is not knowledge, butnescience. The Rationalists thinktradition, far from guiding politicalbehavior, must be extirpated beforepolitical behavior can be guided.And where is the guidance to comefrom after tradition is destroyed?Why, from Rationalism, from a bookof techniques, from a got-by-roteideology in the possession of anideologue who has scraped his mindfree of the humane memory of agesto start, like God, with the begin­ning of the world.

These arrogant and devastatingmen, these sappers at the piers andgirders of the Western culture, theseRationalists, sophisters and ideo­logues, appear first, says ProfessorOakeshott, in Bacon and Descartes(who like all the great innovatorsavoided the more dreadful errors oftheir disciples). They go throughthe always ascending and wideningspiral of ruthlessness and destruc­tion until their inexorable denoue­ment in "the work of Marx andEngels."

European politics without thesewriters (Marx and Engels) ,vouldstill have been deeply involved inRationalisn1, says Oakeshott. Butbeyond question they are the au­thors of the most stupendous of ourpolitical rationalisms-as well they

might be, for it was composed forthe instruction of a less politicallyeducated class than any other thathas ever come to exercise political,power. . . . No other technique hasso imposed itself upon the world asif it were concrete knowledge; nonehas created so vast an intellectualproletariat, with nothing but itstechnique to lose. . . .

It is, of course, unfair to treatProfessor Oakeshott in 1200 words;to pass over his luminous divisionof the political theorists into theNature-Reason men, the Will-Arti­fice men and the Rational Will men;to slight his stoutly anti-Pelagianinsistence on the imperfectibility ofman; to neglect his defense of trueintellectualism and of authenticscience; to skip his warning as early

At any rate. Harry is a man of hisword. He told Ike once he'd help himget anything he wanted, includingthe Presidency. And Harry went outand did just that.

JAMES F. GREELY in "Voice ofthe People" New York DailyNews, Novelnber 18, 1952

[When I leave the White House] Iwould be willing to serve as a direc­tor of some large corporation.

MAJ. GEN. HARRY VAUGHN,quoted by the UP, November12, 1952

The once zealous aid to Communistactivities in other countries has beenreduced to a friendly benediction.I ts decline can be traced simply bylisting the years in which the Com­intern met-1919, 1920, 1921, 1922,1924, 1928, 1935-and then no more.Its dissolution in 1943 was the bury­ing of a long-dead corpse whoseodor had kept on making trouble.

IRVING BRANT, "Road to Peaceand Freedom," 1943

The [$264 billion national] debt willprobably never be paid. This is astartling statement, but I do not be­lieve that anyone should be dis­turbed by it. The fact is, our ex­panded economy needs this addi­tional credit.

REP. WRIGHT PATMAN, quoted inthe Wall Street Journal, South­west Edition, October 23, 1952

as 1939 that orthodox Christianswere the natural allies of libertyagainst the related (indeed thetwin) ideologies and Rationalismsof Nazism and communism; to omitexploration of the suggestive factthat Oakeshott cites Michael Polanyiin England while Filmer S. C. Nor­throp cites Oakeshott in America(N'orthrop's recent appointment inthe Yale School of Law is compar­able in some ways to Oakeshott'ssuccession to Laski at the LSE).

But 1200 words are enough tospread the good news in Americathat at long last the occupant of themagisterial chair of political sciencein the University of London is onthe side of tradition, which is to say,of freedom. It may be very late, butbetter late than never.

Leaders of the Republican Party stilldo not understand that Mr. Roose­velt and Maynard Keynes savedcapitalism.

KINGSLEY MARTIN, New States­man and Nation, July 5, 1952

Which IPaper D'ye Read?

But all night the Republicans sat atthe Hotel Commodore, their handspattering in timid applause as criti­cal state after critical state tumbled,and they were the last to know theirtime had come.

NEW YORK POST, November 5, 1952

There had been loud cheers by 350persons in the bunting-decoratedballroom [Hotel Commodore] at8:30 P.M. when Mr. Summerfieldpredicted a "tidal wave" for Eisen­hower ... at 10 :47 P.M. there weredeafening cries on all sides . . . afrenzy of shouts and cheers whenChairman Summerfield reported vic­tory....

NEW YORK TIMES, November 5, 1952

The Freeman invites contributions to thiscolumn, and will pay $2 for each quota­tion published. If an item is sent in bymore than one person, the one from whomit is first received will be paid. To facili­tate verificationt the sender should givethe title of the periodical or book fromwhich the item is taken, with the exactdate if the source is a periodical and thepublication year and page number if it isa book. Quotations should be brief. Theycan not be returned or acknowledged.

THE EDITORS

DECEMBER 15. 1952 205

By WILLIAM S. SCHLAMM

Arts and EntertainmentsWhat deprives Mr. Chaplin of the

last mitigating circumstance is thefact. that, in this still-born turkey,he was handling the very substanceof hi~ own artistic existence-thefascinating interplay between aclown and his audience. For this isthe story of "Limelight," written(as is everything else, from dia-logue to choreography) by Mr.Chaplin himself: a great music-hallartist, forsaken by a fickle audience,defies the unfaithful in a triumphantcomebacK and dies in the outburstof his glory. What Chaplin (not solong ago the screen's most impec­cably tasteful juggler of sentiments)has done to that story should nothappen in the pulps, which is thepoint of this little essay on corn.

For Mr. Chaplin, noisily angeredby the public indifference to his pre­ceding sophisticated picture, "Mon­sieur Verdoux," had obviously de­cided to grab the inferior audience,this time, by its adolescent prefer­ence for sweets and starches: ifcorn is what they want, he was goingto give it to them-but good. Hegave it to them all right-but verybad; as bad as synthetic corn tasteseach time a haughty mind serves itin a condescending mood.

The physically embarrassing trite­ness of Mr. Chaplin's dialogue (froma seriously uttered "Look, the dawnis breaking" to the involuntarily hi­larious philosophem, "Life is a de­sire, not a meaning") is, if possible,outdone by the amateurishness ofcharacterization: except for twopitifully short (superb) comedyacts, the discarded clown showsnever a convincing affinity for comicgreatness; and his ward of a dancer(prettily played by Claire Bloom)has less than the two dimensions ofa comic-strip ingenue. All that re­mains of the poignancy Mr. Chaplinhad resolved to serve a la corn mushis a sense of loss: one leaves "Lime­light" with the terrible sort of re­gret one felt on encountering JackieCoogan, the unforgettable "Kid,"years later in a moronic bedroomfarce.

Dnlike a rose, corn is not corn isnot corn. When it grows freely froma gay and simple heart, it will pleaseall simple hearts in search of gaiety.But fertilized with the guile of em­bittered cynicism, corn must offendthe simplest palates.

The same day, as it happens, Isaw "Limelight," Charlie Chaplin'seighty-first film and, upon my word,his worst. Now I happen to be oneof those rare schizophrenics who canmanage to combine contempt for Mr.Chaplin's civic arrogance with a sin­cere appreciation of his comic genius.My disgust with "Limelight," I cannot' emphasize too strongly, hasnothing to do with my low opinionof its creator's political intelligenceand private mores. It is simply acheated moviegoer's response to alaughably inferior product.

sweet, satisfying. The lovable elderlyrascal who oozes the unavoidableIrish wisdom looks exactly likeBarry Fitzgerald (and is), the beau­tiful colleen steals your heart justas surely as would Maureen O'Hara(who happens to play the part), andI for one, though incorrigibly dis­qualified as an expert on the day­dreams of the Irish, can not thinkof a single valid ornament omittedfrom this al fresco Irish heaven.

The story (obviously of no impor­tance) takes a retired Americanprizefighter (splendidly played byJohn Wayne) back to his mother'snever-forgotten village in Ireland.The accidental killing of an oppon­ent in the ring has shocked the maninto an almost catatonic state ofnon-violence which, as everybodyknows, is a heck of a state to be inwhen moving to Ireland. Sureenough, the girl's lovable heel of abrother insists on his tribal privilegeof beating the last ounce of pietismout of his quiet brother-in-law (inthe most hilarious and most humanesequence of brutalities I have everseen in the movies) so that every­body may at last settle down to alife of guaranteed Irish bliss. Yetthe point is that, when I left thetheater, my eyes, decidedly not Irish,were just as smiling as those of allthe deliriously happy Macs andSeans in whose company I had en­joyed. the picture. For we hadfeasted· on Grade-A corn.

Two Grades of Corn

To be palatable at all, corn must beproduced by people who honestlythink they are creating art. Eachtime a serious writer, impatientwith his respectable poverty, hastried to get rich on a synthetic cropof corn, the wages of his sin haveremained ludicrously low. For noliterary market is more sensitive todishonesty; and the moment cornaddicts smell a condescending calcu­lation in 'the sugary brew, they goon strike. This is why Faith Bald­win will always be in clover: thelady is manifestly moved by, andloves, what she is writing. But,verily, there is an awe-inspiring j llS­

tice in the laws of creation whichsentences the dissimulating high­brow to financial as well as. to artis­tic deficits.

Two current films, in fortuitousproximity, are putting these laws tothe test-John Ford's "The QuietMan" and Charlie Chaplin's "Lime­light." Both are corn (and nevermind the mendacious adjectives someChaplin-cultists have been using inmetropolitan reviews to disguisetheir audible embarrassment). Butwe are being offered two differentgrades of corn. "The Quiet Man" isGrade A. "Limelight," to put itcharitably, is Grade Z.

John Ford went off on a bingeof Irish sentimentality-an unre­strained, shameless, technicolor whaleof a binge. Yes, the island is emer­ald, the colleen a redhead, every­body's heart gold, the funk of dia­logue blue, the IRA noble, the shil­lelagh knotty, the music s6ft, thepriests tough. It is the quintessenceof Ireland, completely untouched by:lny sense of reality, the genuine~tuffdreams are made of in ThirdAvenue saloons. It is also an un­mitigated pleasure.

For John Ford and his magnificentbrood of 'Irish ham players enjoyedevery bit of what they were doing.All stops' were pulled, and out' camethe thickest corn syrup-fragrant,

206 THE FREEMAN

A Reviewer's Notebook-~

By JOHN CHAMBERLAIN

John Steinbeck never writes the same book twice.Indeed, one is tempted to say that· he is never thesame man twice. He grows and changes, sometimesdoing a good thing, sometimes a mediocre thing,but always picking at the riddle of human charac­ter and human destiny with that air of divine dis­satisfaction that marks the true philosopher. His"East of Eden" (Viking, $4.50) is hardly a disci­plined or a shapely novel, but it has the vitalitythat comes from the author's ability to expand hishorizons even in middle age.

The sense of place always figures importantly ina Steinbeck book. Here, as in the past, he is writingabout his old stamping grounds along the Cali­fornia coast to the south of San Francisco, a placewhere the rains are uncertain, sometimes drivingin from the Pacific to make the land lush, some­times moving to the north where greenery is not soepisodic or whimsical. The atmospheric fluctuationof the Salinas region seems to have a certain re­flection in Mr. Steinbeck's more important charac­ters. For "East of Eden," besides being the inter­twined chronicle of two families, the Hamiltonsand the Trasks, is a dramatic celebration of thedoctrine of free will; and Mr. Steinbeck's AdamTrask, SalTIuel Hamilton and China Boy Lee havethe refreshing and inspiriting ability to forgethemselves anew from time to time in the smithyof their souls.

The new Steinbeck is an individualist and a vol­untarist; there is no economic determinism, nopredestination, no mechanistic inevitability here.The book represents a curious mutation, for Stein­beck, as all his fans know, is an amateur biologistwho has sought to unravel the mystery of life byapplying the rules of science to his researches intomarine fauna and flora. The Steinbeck of "TheGrapes of Wrath" was a Henry George, or Mal­thusian, economic determinist: his Okies were con­ceived as victims of an inflexible iron law of rent.The Steinbeck who wrote "Of Mice and Men" be­lieved in the tyranny of the genes. But there wasalways a more wayward Steinbeck-the Steinbeckwho loved the Mexican manana, the vagrant im­pulses of his wine-drinking paisanos. This Stein­beck has survived the Steinbeck who dabbled inneo-Marxian philosophies in the thirties. The newSteinbeck has pushed his individualism to the ex­treme point where he can say "nothing was evercreated by two men. There are no good collabora­tions, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathe-

matics, in philosophy ... the group never inventsanything."

In his reaction against scientific determinismSteinbeck has discovered that truth can be foundin myth and legend. "East of Eden," philosophi­cally considered, is an ambitious attempt to re­write the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. The Godof John Steinbeck, however, is not the God of JohnCalvin, or of any other predestinarian sect thathas chosen to make a great deal out of "the markof Cain." The fascinating Chinese servant whogoes by the name of Lee in "East of Eden" dis­covers, after conducting certain researches into theword usages of the ancient Hebrews, that Godmade the choice between good and evil an optionalthing with Cain. The Hebrew word "timshel," soLee informs the troubled Adam Trask, means"Thou mayest." It is wrongly translated in theKing James Bible as "Thou shalt," and in theAmerican Standard version as "Do thou." Facedwith an order or a simple prediction of futurity,says Steinbeck, man can not rise to human great­ness. But when faced with the necessity of choos­ing his own course of morality, man can transcendthe status of a beast. It takes some 600 pages andtwo generations of life to make the point in "Eastof Eden," but it is a point worth making these days.

As for the strictly narrative side of "East ofEden," Steinbeck still has a lot to learn about theselection of incident and detail. As a foil for histruly human characters, Steinbeck has created acomplete monster named Cathy. Cathy burns herfather and mother to death, cuckolds and shootsher husband, abandons her sons, and poisons themadame of a Salinas bawdy house in order to getpossession of the valuable illicit trade in sex forherself. It is quite possible that such monsters asCathy can actually exist. But their motivations areso incomprehensible that the dramatist can donothing useful with them. If Steinbeck had usedCathy sparingly, introducing her merely to showthat men are often dazzled by a dream of beautythat is not there, I could have stood her. But themany pages through which Cathy parades her in­comprehensible self left me singularly bored. Theonly thing that Cathy has to teach the humanreader is that humanity can not be expected froma tigress. But William Blake said it all in a singleline of "Tiger, tiger, burning bright." "Did HeWho made the lamb make thee?" Cathy is an acci­dent, a freak-and the word "timshel," or "Thou

DECEMBER 15, 1952 207

mayest," does not apply to her.Reading about her monstrosities islike reading about a mythical raceof Martians. She isn't worth thetime aIld the space that Steinbeckhas devoted to her.

On the other hand, the Hamiltons(from one of whom Steinbeck him­self is descended) are worth all thespace they get in "East of Eden."These Hamiltons, the progeny ofIrish kings in their own estimation,are so far from the zombie or mon­ster state that one wishes they livednext door. Old Samuel, scholar,farmer, philosopher, metal workerand water dowser, is one of thebreed that made America. His landin California was as poor and asbarren as anything' an Okie evertried to farm. But Samuel, being noOkie, made do with his flinty soil,and raised a full brood on it. No de­pendence on the Welfare State here,no whining to the God of a SociologyUnknown. If Steinbeck had onlymade friends with his maternalgrandfather years ago, we wouldhave been spared the more fallaciouspages of "The Grapes of Wrath."

The Newest LeviathanDemocracy at Bay, by Felix Som­

ary. Translated' by Norbert Gut­erman. New York: Knopf. $2.50

One of the greatest scholars andn10st penetrating liberal thinkers ofthe nineteenth century was theSwiss Jacob Burckhardt. Far moreclearly than the average American,'to whom the two words are almostsynonyms, Burckhardt recognizedthe distinction between individualliberty, in which he passionately be­lieved, and democracy, in which hesaw the seeds of demagogic tyranny.Burckhardt foresaw more clearlyperhaps than any thinker of the lib··eral nineteenth century the loomingdanger of totalitarianism; of de­mocracy, unballasted by careful pro­vision for individual rights, becom­ing corrupted into tyranny based onmass organization and propaganda.

Now, after many of Burckhardt'sgloomier visions of the shape ofthings to come have been realized,and exceeded, under the regimes ofStalin and Hitler, another Swiss

208 THE FREEMAN

Lest Yon ForgetSOME RECENT BOOKS

FOR LIBERTARIANS

Arrow in the Blue, by ArthurKoestler (Macmillan)

Heroic Finland, by David Hinshaw(Putnam)

The Great Idea, by Henry Hazlitt(Appleton-Century-Crofts)

Witness, by Whittaker Chambers(Random)

Essays on Liberty, edited by Leon­ard Read (Foundation for Eco­nomic Education)

author contributes a brilliant analy­sis of the anatomy of our age ofwars, violent revolutions and creep­ing and galloping collectivism. Inthis short work Dr. Somary, abanker and economist and a manwho combines profound eruditionwith striking wit, has held up amirror to our time which is verymuch worth looking into.

Rousseau and Marx are the twointellectual villains in Somary'sstory, and it would be hard to esti­mate how many human beings havebeen guillotined, shot, sent to con­centration camps, expropriated andotherwise manhandled because oftwo fatal fallacious phrases. Theseare Rousseau's Uvolonte generale"and Marx's "dictatorship of the pro­letariat."

The former, with its implicationthat the whole people could assumesovereignty without check or re­straint, opened the way for theJ acobin tyranny which bears n1anytraits of similarity with Soviet dic­tatorship. The second was a ready­made instrument for revolutionaryadventurers who would rule in thename of the proletariat, but wouldactually subject all classes, includingthe proletariat, to the arbitrarypower of an uncontrolled and irre­sponsible State.

Like every liberal thinker worthyof the name, Somary cherishes aprofound distrust of the power ofthe State. Pointing out that "para­doxically the same revolution inFrance brought the enthusiastic in­troduction of liberty and its com­plete negation," he notes that "theepoch of the French Revolution toreaway all the restraints which limited

the activity of the state." This devi­ates from the idealized pattern of"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," tothe accompaniment of the "Mar­seillaise"; but it is historical truthnevertheless. If one reads Burke'sessay on the French Revolution inthe light of our own time, one findsnot a mere outburst of petulant nos­talgic reaction, but a very rationaland sober analysis of the perils ofthe unlimited revolutionary Stateauthority.

Wars became bigger and govern­ments became more powerful as aresult of the French Revolution, theeffect of which, of course, was notlimited to France. And in these twofacts Somary sees much of thetragedy of our time. As the authorconclusively proves, the capitalistsystem, which brought the humanrace more freedom and more ma­terial well-being than it has knownunder any other, did not follow thecourse of disintegration from with­in which lVlarx forecast. Not one ofMarx's supposed scientific "laws" ofeconomic development, set forth in"Capital," was vindicated by thecourse of events. There was no in­creasing misery of the proletariat,no collapse from internal contradic­tions, no automatic triumph of so..cialism in the more economically ad­vanced countries.

But the gigantic wars of thetwentieth century brought aboutmuch of what Marx foresaw as a re­suIt of the development of capital.ism. (Somal'Y, incidentally, givesshort shrift to the theory that warsare a product of capitalism.) Someof the most eloquent passages in thebook describe the disastrous effectsof the modern mass war on the freesociety.

Decisions are forbidden to thefrontline soldier; central state au­thorities decide about him; he be­comes a number in a regiment thatis itself numbered. His way of lifeis prescribeci; his physical needs andthose of his family are cared for.He has to fulfill his service dutiesand to care about nothing else. . . .War makes uniform thought andspeech, food and clothing, living anddying.... War is favorable to au­tocracies and all forms of despotism.. . . The freedom of the economy, thefreedom of politics, and freedom ingeneral does not suit the system.

The author sees the germ of com-

munism in Walter Rathenau's or­ganization of the German economyduring the first World War. Modernwars, waged on the unlimited prin­ciple, lead to confiscatory taxation,to currency debasement and to con­tinuous government intervention inecononlic life.

A most serious consequence of thisage of all-out wars and all-out tyran­nies is the growing contempt for in­dividual human life. Somary re­marks that Cromwell's consciencewas troubled by the execution ofCharles I and that Napoleon wasplaced morally on the defensive bythe execution of the Duc d'Enghien.But there is no evidence that thetotalitarian rulers of the twentiethcentury ever lost any sleep over thefate of the uncounted multitudeswhom they condemned to death orslavery. Indeed, one sometimes feelsthat the normal feeling of revulsionfor murder is suspended if the mur­der is committed on a sufficientlywholesale scale.

One can give only a few samplesof the witty epigrams and paradoxes,the neatly phrased judgments whichmake the book as readable as it isthoughtful and, in some places, pro­found. Democracy, Somary says, candevelop in the common interest onlyon two conditions: That the citizen,be independent of the State and theState be independent of externalpressure. Discussing modern financemethods, Somary finds it a curiousparadox that the debtor, the State,is empowered to create the moneywhich frees him from debt. In pri­vate property he sees value not onlyas a right of the individual in rela­tion to other individuals, but as aright against the State, a limitationof its powers. He offers a number of"social laws of inverse proportion"which seem applicable to our age:

"The greater the concentration ofpower, the less the responsibility."

"The more functions a state under­takes the more difficult it is to con­trol its administration." (RecentWashington investigations certainlyconfirm this proposition.)

"The greater and more many­sided the State, the less influentialthe people." (The great Russian his­torian Kluchevsky put this pointstill more forcefully and brieflywhen he said, in describing thegrowth of Tsarist power: "The state

swelled and the people shrank.")"The more laws and judicial de­

CISIons, the less justice."When one begins to quote Somary

it is hard to stop. That is why onemust cheer this appearance in Eng­lish translation of a most brilliant,lucid and brief dissection of the

modern State, a greater leviathanthan Hobbes ever dreamed of.

WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN

Maker of Mystery

Wilkie Collins: A Biography, byKenneth Robinson. New York:l'\1:acmillan. $4.50

Wilkie Collins is fortunate in hispresent biographer. Mr. Robinson isnot only a warm admirer of theauthor of "The Woman in White"and "The Moonstone" but has goneto a great deal of trouble to proveit. A less admiring or even a lesscourageous man wouldn't have at­tempted the job he has undertakenhere, for only too often his hero was"the man who wasn't there." Inshort, Wilkie Collins, maker of mys­tery, was in many respects a first­class mystery himself. To begin,vith, he didn't write the kind ofletters which should be burned (dia­tribes against carpet bags and peo­ple who object to garlic in theirsauces being the sort of thing thatgot him epistolarily worked up) ; hedestroyed practically all letters wri t­ten to him; he never kept a diaryand seldom let anything of an inti­mate nature slip out even when inhis cups. To drag up a well-roundedpicture from such skimpy depthstakes devoted delving. Mr. Robin­son's has paid off.

There was nothing mysteriousabout Wilkie Collins's background.His paternal grandfather was an artdealer and his father was a land­scape painter who exhibited regu­larly at the Academy. Born in Lon­don, January 8, 1824, his firstrecollections were of a comfortablehome surrounded by the teemingimpersonality of a city. His child­hood was obviously a happy one.There seemed to be none of thoserepressions and neuroses which soenrich writers when they finallybegin to write. That he was preco­cious was attested by the fact that

he read "The Sorrows of Werther"at the age of eleven. His fatherwanted him to enter the church butas he showed no inclination for it,he was apprenticed to a tea importerinstead. Latel" he took a shot at thelaw. The one thing that interestedhim was travel and his first glimpse

of Paris made him a Francophilefor life. He liked everything-thewine, the food, the bookstalls, life onthe boulevards. The highlight of thetrip, however, was an encounter atthe n10rgue-the body of a younggirl who had been strangled, thenthrown into the Seine. Just whathad led up to this grisly denoue­ment? It was at this mOlTIent thatvVilkie Collins became a writer.

His first serious literary effortwas a biography of his father, whichresulted in a meeting "vith Dickens-an event important to them both,for it ripened into a lifelong friend­ship. He also met Holman Hunt andthe Rossettis and sat to Millais. Theresulting portrait shows him to bea sn10oth-faced young- man withspectacles and a bulbous forehead.

When Dickens toured Europe, Col­lins accompanied him. Dickens wasenthusiastic about him as a travel­ing companion until he began togrow a moustache. "You remem­ber," he wrote to his wife, "how thecorners of his mouth go down, howhe looks through his spectacles andthe way he manages his legs? Idon't know why it is, but the lTIOUS­tache horribly exaggerates all this."

Wilkie Gollins was against mar­riage as an institution and it wasn'tuntil he was thirty-five that hebecame seriously involved with awoman. One bright moonlit nightas he and Millais were walking homefrom a party, they were stopped bya scream corning from the garden ofa villa near by. Suddenly the gateopened and out dashed the figure ofa young woman dressed in flowingwhite. She came up, paused in anattitude of supplication and terror,then vanished. Millais was rooted tothe spot but Collins ran after her.He refused to talk about the ad­venture except to say that her namewas Mrs. Caroline Graves and thatshe was a woman of good birth whohad accidentally fallen into thehands of a man who kept her pris­oner by mesmeric means. It was her

DECEMBER 15, 1952 209

escape that they had witnessed, andCollins had taken her home withhim. It turned out to be a marriagein all but name. He even adopted herdaughter who later acted as hisamanuensis. Later, Mrs. Gravesmarried a Mr. Clow and Collinsattended the wedding. Then he tookup with a young woman namedMartha Rudd by whom he had threechildren. He referred to the menageas his "morganatic family" andprovided for all four of them in hiswill. Eventually 'Caroline returnedto him and stayed with him until hisdeath twenty years later. These arethe bare facts of the case. The restwas wrapped in mystery and still is.

It was during the first year oftheir liaison that Wilkie Collinswrote "The Woman in White"-abook inspired by that scream in themoonlight and that shrouded figurefleeing toward the shadows of Re­gent's Park. It was an instant suc­cess. Dickens praised it and Thack­eray sat up all night reading it. Itwas at this time that Collins statedhis famous principle in writing fic­tion: "make 'em cry, make 'emlaugh, make 'em wait." But he couldalso claim a desire to make 'emthink, for he suddenly became im­bued with a zeal for reform andbegan to write novels with a pur­pose. This was undoubtedly due tothe influence of Charles Reade andproved to be disastrous. Novels witha purpose were simply not his forte.

It was during this period that hebecame afflicted with rheumaticpains, a forerunner of the goutwhich tormented him until his deathand which resulted in his contract­ing the opium habit. Most of "TheMoonstone" was dictated while hewas confined to his bed. He had dif­ficulty finding a secretary callousenough to ignore his groans and payattention to his words. I-Ie after­wards told his actress friend, MaryAnderson, that the book was largelywritten while he was under the effectof opium, and that when it wasfinished he had difficulty recognizingit as his own.

Dicken~'s death was a great shockto him. They were not only closefriends, they had inspired one an­other. Dickens had started "EdwinDrood" under Collins's influence andthere were even rumors that thelatter would complete it.

210 THE FREEMAN

Like Dickens, Collins undertook aReading Tour of America; unlikeDickens, Collins liked Americans. Hepraised their kindness, generosityand sincerity. Physically he hadnever felt better in his life. Not onetwinge during the entire trip. Butgout claimed him once more afterhis return to England and he in­creased his opium intake. A year ortwo before he died, Hall Caine sawhim quaff off a wine glass of lauda­num. When he expressed his horror,Collins merely smiled and remindedhim that De Quincey used to drinkthe stuff out of a jug. He died in1889 after a ,stroke followed by abronchitis. Caroline died six yearslater and was buried in the samegrave. Martha Rudd, the mother ofhis children, tended the double gravefaithfully until she, too, vanishedfrom the scene.

Although Wilkie Collins wrote thirtybooks and a dozen plays, his famerests on but two, both of themhaving a profound effect on writingof the future. In "The Woman inWhite" he stripped the old-fashionedsensation novel of its Gothic trap­pings and made it credible andtherefore more spine-chilling. "TheMoonstone" was the forerunnner ofthe present English detective story.However~ the centenary of his birthpassed unnoticed, and it wasn't untilhis rediscovery by writers like T. S.Eliot, Walter de la Mare and DorothyL. Sayers that interest in him wasreawakened.

As a person, Wilkie Collins wasgentle and tolerant of most thingsexcept cruelty and humbug. Indif­ferent to convention, he lived the lifehe chose· to liveand wrote what hewanted to write. His courage andwill power enabled him to resist,with the help -of opiates, twenty-fiveyears of pain which would havebroken most men. Nothing less thanutter prostration could keep himfrom his work. He had a morbidinterest in disease, deformity anddeath-undoubtedly the result ofsome psychological maladj ustment,the reason for which is obscure.This, combined with an almost path­ological reticence where his privatelife was concerned, is the reasonwhy any picture of him is doomedfrom the - outset to be incomplete.That this book enables the reader

to obtain an occasional glimpse ofthe real Wilkie Collins through theshadows he deliberately allowed tothicken around him is due to Mr.Robinson's industry and intuition.An excellent piece of work.

ALIX DU POY

Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson's Own Story, se­

lected and edited by Donald Day.Boston: Little, Brown. $5.00

More than twenty-eight years afterhis death this latest book about

'Woodrow Wilson mirrors anew afew of his own contradictions-someunderstandably human and othersirritatingly partisan. Since I was aprivileged Wilsonian interviewerthroughout 1912, the quotationsawaken memories, like finding in old~ge a long-lost childhood book. AsWilsoniana Mr. Day's work is acompact condensation of seriatimviews in Wilson's own words fromboyhood to death's eve. Many gemstherein, highlighted for easy read­ing by Mr. Day, should be carefullyconsidered reading for Harry S.Truman and acolytes and survivinglast-ditch Rooseveltians.

Wilson's peace - without- victory1917 address that stirred so manyanimosities-and is 'still acrimo­niously remembered - makes rilewonder if President Truman's "po­lice action" isn't something of asteal, although I doubt the Lamarboy has even remembered the for­mula. The parallel becomes moreapparent in the light of Wilson'sstatement of March 1916, as to whyPershing pursued Villa in Mexicanterritory. It was done under agree­ment with Mexican authorities "andin no sense intended as an invasionof that republic or as an infringe­ment of its sovereignty." This coun­try went to Korea's aid with Seoul'sofficial nod and carried on againstthe come-lately Red Chinese bandits.The Mexican "punitive measure"was even more truly an internationalpolice action, and S9 history mustrecord it.

As to the magenta-hued officialgentry so solicitous about "freespeech" for Communists, Wilson meta similar problem involving N'ormanThomas (once his Princeton pupil),

and a particular issue of The WorldTomorrow. Wilson directed the postalauthorities to "treat these men withall possible consideration, for I knowthey are absolutely sincere and Iwould not like this publication heldup unless there is a very clear caseindeed." Thus guardedly he blessedfree speech. The Thomas brand ofsocialism was, of course, celestial ascompared with the American versionof the sovietistic credo.

Said Wilson a month prior to hisfirst inaugural: "It is intolerablethat any President should be per­mitted to determine who should suc­ceed him-himself or another-bypatronage or coercion, or by anysort of control of the machinery bywhich delegates to the nominatingconvention are chosen.... The nom­inations should be made directly bythe people at the polls." FDR andHST, quo vadis?

Wilson asserted in his self-profilebefore the Gridiron Club (1914)that he couldn't recognize himselffrom his press portrayals. Well,could any President? All Presidentslap up the not uncalculated goo andrage against candid snapshots. Curi­ously, Wilson had forgotten thatonly a year before he had writtento Mary A. Hulbert, his epistolaryand confessive companion (oncebruited about as Mrs. Peck), that hecould not identify himself in thegreatest office in the world. "It isnot me...."

Maybe FDR went by his party'spatron-saint's 1913 opinion thatfour years is too short a term fora President "who is doing or at­tempting a great work of reformand who has not had time to finishit." But who ultimately is the judgeof the reform's woe or weal? For­tunately now a man is limited tonot more than eight years-twicetoo long for the wrong Mr. Big.

There has been lots said aboutthis. In February, 1912, WW oratedthat "Politics did not enter business.Let me tell you that business enteredpolitics." But he was fair enough toqualify against business in politicsif it meant influence' of money and ofprivilege. Who today can deny thatthe government is in business athousand times more than businessis in government?

Two years before he took over,Wilson wrote that "I believe very

profoundly in an overruling Provi­dence, and do not believe that anyreal plans can be thrown off thetrack." So have reiterated Rooseveltand Truman. There is no doubt thatWilson stepped into the White Housewith not a chip but a boulder on hisshoulder. He wasn't sure he wouldbe President but he was emphaticabout wanting to be President,meanwhile awaiting "the event" anddoing everything he could to discom­fit his enemies. Who were thoseenemies and did he discomfit them?

Of the Presidents I have known,beginning with Teddy, all save Cool­idge and Hoover fought the Senatein some degree. Wilson practicallywent to war against it. And, likeTaft and Harding and, FDR andHST, he forgot that some senatorson the job preceded and would con­tinue long after the President. True,Congress isn't so much to brag aboutnowadays as compared with the na­tional legislatures of a generation ortwo ago, but one can still be thank­ful it's around.

At this point, what with the ques­tion of the ethics of "outside funds,"one may well wonder if forty yearsago fault couldn't have been foundwith Wilson's partial dependence onincome from a publishing housesaved from extinction by J. P. Mor­gan the elder. Nor was it Woodrow'sfault that he didn't get a Carnegieteacher's pension. He certainly triedhard for it. A. R. PINGI

We Asked for ItThe Korea Story, by John C. Cald­

well in collaboration with LesleyFrost. Chicago: Regnery. $3.00

MEMO to: The Alnerican TaxpayerRe: Putting good money after bad.

If you want to know how your in­vestment in a peaceful campaignagainst aggression and for Americaninterests in the Far East resultedin a war anything but cold, digdown into whatever small amount ofgreen residue Uncle Sam has leftyou and buy "The Korea Story."

Read it twice over. Let it sink in.I did. It is the first adequate ex­

planation I've had of why I and hun­dreds of thousands of other Ameri­cans responded to an SOS from a

forgotten peninsula and a patheticpeople on our Pacific perimeter.

By the time the 80S was flashedit was necessary that we be there;necessary, as the Army pointed outrepeatedly, to man the Korean fox­holes because they were the foxholesin front of American homes, ourhomes. But the Army's explanationwas strictly a hole-in-the-dike busi­ness. It is the military way to ignorethe political and the historical ante­cedents. The explanation of the mo­ment sufficed us as individuals aslong as vve were there. But as rota­tion drifted us home, some in onepiece, some piecemeal, it ceased togo down. It reached the adam's ap­ple, not the guts.

The simple truth, as Mr. Caldwellshows, is that we asked for it. Wewere floored by a left cross to thewrong cheek in China; and when westaggered to our knees we turnedthe other cheek for a similar bot­toms-up in Korea.

Mr. Caldwell is a former StateDepartment official. The son of aChina missionary, he served the De­partment with the Marshall Missionin his native land and with a mis­begotten mission in Korea. In thisbook he has a sorry story to tell. Hetells it without venom, giving creditwhere it is infrequently due and dis­credit, factually, to a policy whichwas no policy and to the manipu­lators who approved and improvedits impotency.

The Department of State, duringand after World War II, eagerlypromoted two objectives in the FarEast, Mr. Caldwell relates:

One was to persuade its personnelin China and elsewhere that ChineseCommunism was what China needed;that if \ve were patient we wouldfind that we could work shoulder toshoulder with the Communists; thatif Chiang were not deposed, at leasthe should bring the COlnmunists intoa coalition governnlent. The other,though not so official nor so well or­ganized, was none the less vicious.I t was designed to discredit GeneralMacArthur and to picture hinl as apower-driven reactionary who wouldruin our hopes for developing a truedemocracy in Japan.

Mr. Caldwell does not waste theink to point out how eminently suc­cessful both policies were. The es­sence of these policies spread to Ko':rea and remained until the North

DECEMBER 15, 1952 211

Korean D-Day, June 25, 1950. Thedust under Allied flags was allowed"to settle" while the· dust in NorthKorea was stirred to billowing warclouds by the feet of armed men.

General MacArthur's Korean re­sponsibilities, including those of in­telligence, were stripped from himin 1948 to make way for the "demo­cratizing influence" of the AmericanlVIission in Korea-Al\IIK. The mis­sion, led by Ambassador John J.Muccio, who recently dressed downSyngman Rhee for advocating popu­lar election of the executive, had awonderful time. Its personnel en­joyed tax-free incomes, 'tax-freebooze, and "gook" entourages of fouror five servants.

Somehow they never did getaround to visiting the people andthe provinces they had come to serve.They had no truck with the mis­sionaries who did. When they im­ported American "culture" they toldKoreans who live in mud cottageshow a city skyscraper is built, orthey filled up one of Seoul's largestbuildings, confiscated of course, withmillions of volumes in English. Noone seemed to bother about the factthat a majority of Koreans are il­literate in their own language.

Mr. Caldwell points out that veryfew mission members ever leftSeoul's paved streets for the rougher,washboard trails of Korea's' pic­turesque countryside. Not one offi­cial of the United States Informa­tion Service, for example, was sta­tioned away from the capital.

The mission also had the crucialtask of preparing the ROK forcesfor any emergency and of keepingintelligence tabs on the agrarian re­formers to the north. Three weeksbefore the Red attack and the awe­inspiring retreat of the untrained,ill-armed South Korean forces, mis­sion publicity had billed the ROKAas "the best damn army outside theUnited States."

Throughout those three prewaryears top mission "experts" and offi­cials closed their ears to the dis­quieting reports of the build-up andthe threats of Kim II Sung. Theyclosed their eyes to the stream ofmore than two million refugees pour­ing south across the parallel.

I t was no wonder then, as Mr.Caldwell reminisces, that until Gen­eral MacArthur evicted chaos fororder as Communist troops reachedthe edge of Seoul, Ambassador Muc-

212 THE FREEMAN

cio and his chief aides were stillconvinced a South Korean flag wouldbe waving over Pyongyang streetswithin the fortnight.

With the publication of his 180-

Second HarvestThe Golden Bowl, by Henry James.

Introduction by R. P. Blackmur.New York: Grove Press. $6.50

The Good Soldier, by Ford MadoxFord. New York: Knopf. $3.00

Ford Madox Ford, whose novels arebeing republished by Knopf, likedand respected Henry James, whm:nhe called "the master." Ford was theloving turtle-dove of Ecclesiastes;talent for him was April rain andthe ,first green things. His memoirs-"Portraits from Life," for exam­ple-seem to me more worthy of re­issue than his novels. James haddone the young Ford in a novel,Morton Densher in "'The Wings ofthe Dove," piling up those panicky,precautionary, and altogether medi­ocre adjectives in the lorn hope thatone of them would catch the man.J ames said that every epithet shouldbe a paying piece, but describedFord as a longish, leanish, fairishgentleman. The Ford I knew wasfeeble, wise, old, with a puffy gait.I used to meet him as he shuffledslowly up Eighth Street. His speechwas no less muffled than his walk,and I found it very hard to under­stand him because I was arrogantand self-loving. I could not imaginethat such a Caliban could containgenius. He always stopped to giveme an obese, asthmatic greeting,and pudgily asked me to bring himmy novels. He lived at 10 Fifth Ave­nue where he had a pair of poorlittle rooms, with no more than sixpieces of furniture.

He used to give Thursday teaswith Sutter cookies. In the begin­ning I said little to him. Then I be­gan to revalue the heavy, sluggishtortoise of letters. He was already apublic figure, much admired and notread, and he was reputed to be amarvelous liar. I t was SherwoodAnderson, who began his apprentice­ship as a writer by feigning mad­ness, who told me how much Fordlied. Anderson later gave up the pre­tense to madness, and went sane.Ford was another sort of deceivel" ;

page journal, Iv.l:r. Caldwell has lostall chance of obtaining a bang-upreference from lVIr. Dean Acheson,lame duck of Washington, D. C.

DAVID STOLBERG

By EDWARD DAHLB:ERG

he belonged to that most lonely oftribes, the crazy, windmill sect ofDon Quixote, who could not enduresolitude and the ordinary limits ofhuman experience. What Ford didnot have to give he simply invented.It was not enough that he hadhelped D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound,vVilliam Carlos Williams, AllenTate, Nathan Asch, and I don'tknow how many others. James hadsaid that Ford had too much senseto be in art, and too little to be outof it. True, neither Ford nor Jameswas disfigured by passion. Theywere men of taste, which, withoutpoetic fire, is prudentlal, congealed­genius. But let us return to HenryJames.

James, Joseph Conrad, StephenCrane and Ford lived within walk­ing or buggy distance from eachother in rural England. James, atRye, kept a fine house and lawn witha butler, upper and lower housemaid,cook, knife-boy and gardener. A de­votee of style, he wrote superan­nuated, panting sentences with adull metronomic beat. He accumu­lated his circumlocutions for design,for he cared more for propriety thanhe did for the universe.

James studied decorum so merci­lessly that he knew whether theflorid face of a hostess and her car­pet jarred, or whether her dresswent with the Dresden objet d'art.He believed in the moral propertiesof appointments; milieu was hispassion. Everything he did was fortaste, and it was impossible for himto be clear because he wanted to betactful. He fussed over his sentences,putting in long, enervating paren­theses, and then tortured the poor,tired sentence all over again to makea positively arid and mediocre ob­servation. He created a specious rhe­toric loaded with many syntacticalfaults which have since been takenup as literary metaphysics by theJamesian acolytes. What was impor­tant with James was not to showany fault barbarously. He nevercould forgive Gustave Flaubert for

Contents

by the great economist

AT YOURBOOKSTORE

ORPOSTPAID. FROM

PUBLISHER

$3.00

THE INDEX LISTSTHOUSANDS OFNAMES, TITLES,

TOPICS, ETC.

8. Benjamin M. AndersonChallenges the Philosophy of thePseudo-Prog ressives

9. Profit and loss

10. Economic Teaching at theUniversities

11. Trends Can Change

12. The Political Chances of Genuineliberalism

WHITE CROSS BOOKS707 Browder Street Dallasl Texas

"Timely and important."-Los Angeles Times.

"The product of a wide experience and inten­sive study."-New Orleans Times-Picayune.

"Documentary matter is complete with assur­ance of validity."-New Haven Journal-Courier.

Less than nine months (Nov. 16, 1933) afterhis first inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt recog­nized the Communist rulers of Russia.

Within eight months (Dec. 15, 1945) Mr. Tru-man withdrew support from the anti-Communist 7thgovernment of China. Printing

Pro-Soviet forces will now try to influence the policies and theappointments of our ne# administration.

WHAT ARE THOSE FORCES? HOW DO THEY WORK.,For the full answer, and for methods of counteraction, read

r;~;en;en;en;en;ene~e,;enelfiZJlfi9/I/ifl

REDS DON'T ELECT PRESIDENTS!THEIR PLAN IS TO CONTROL

PRESIDENTS!

Obtain your copy from your bookdealer:

Cloth $3.00i Paper $1.50

-THE IRON CURTAIN OVER AMERICABy John Beaty

Libertarian Press, South Hollandl Illinois

Twelve Essays and Addresses

Dr. Ludwig von Mises

PLANNING FOR FREEDOM

1. Planning FO'rfreedom

2. Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leadsto Socialism

3. Laissez Faire or Dictatorship4. Stones Into Bread, the Keynesian

Miracle

5. lord Keynes and Say's Law

6. Inflation and Price Control

7. 'Economic Aspects of the PensionProblem

receiving him in Paris in a soiledsmock.

J ames loathed poverty and frump­ish materials. He wrote: "The worsthorror was the acres of varnish."When Ford brought a guest whothe old man at Rye thought was oflow origin, he refused to receivehim. The poor could never be put inright relation to intrigue.

The sole Jamesian principle istaste, not energy. The matriarch in"The Golden Bowl," though in mid­dling circumstances, is accustomedto objects of genteel breeding, andis suitable to be the mentor of vir­gins and wan young men. Mrs.Touchett ("Portrait of a Lady")takes Isabel Archer R\Vay from vul­gar Albany and sets her where shemay by the finest shadings movefrom maidenhood to gentle, fiscalbridehood. In "The Golden Bowl" itis the elderly Fanny Assinghamupon whom the Prince leans. Herhusband is a doltish colonel whohelps her provide a gelded marriagein which two people occupy space atdifferent intervals. The Prince isdull, or as James writes in one ofhis countless, high-born platitudes,"innocent, beautiful, vague."

J ames was the canniest malepeeper that ever observed femininehabits. In his lengthy, busybodysentences he is not behind the arraswatching a woman; he is much toonear the subject-matter for that. In"The Golden Bowl," when CadotteStant comes into the room and seesher hostess vvith a man she is notprepared for, she comes in altogethercomposed-which is just what awoman would do, and exactly what aman can not do without being ex­orbitantly clumsy. Such trifling de­tails are only valued by the feminine.J ames comprehends the female ur­gency to delay, and knows that pa­tience is a tactic; it is his knowledgeof decorum that enables him to guessan adulterous act in "The Portraitof a Lady." When Isabel Archer no­tices her husband seated while he istalking to Madame Merle, who isstanding, she knows that the re­laxed, intimate f amiliarity betweenthem is illicit.

James had so little masculineforce that he had to take up the ladytrades of the ruse, the advantageand the investment. He offers therefined and superannuated scandale,untainted by impropriety or the rankmisdemeanors of the blood.

------------------------------------

NAME , , .ADDRESS , . , .. , , ..

CITY ,' , .. ,.,., .. ,ZONE , .. STATE ,., .

HENRY GE'ORGESocial Thinker Ys. Land Communist

0/0 The FREE.MAN,Dep't. A, 240 Madison Ave., New York 16, N. Y.

Please send me the book PROGRESS AND POVERTY, Aniversary Edition,571 pages cloth bound, with free gift of Spencer Heath's booklet PROGRESSAND POVERTY REVIEWED and Its Fallacies Exposed. I enclose $1.50.

n-IcW echslerism

May I offer a personal experience foot;­note to your excellent editorial "He:Certain 'Liberals,' "in the issue of N 0,­

vembel' 17. One of the individuals lYlen::­tioned in this editorial was JamesWechsler, editor of the New York Post.

After the publication of my book,"America's Second Crusade," the Postpublished an editorial of violent abusewhich completely misrepresented whatI had written in the book and my per­sonal viewpoint in general. The edi­torial, for instance, suggested that Ifavored "joining up with the Germansand the Japanese" in the late war. Butit was the "Trust Stalin" boys, not theopponents of involvement, who werefor linking the United States with apowerful totalitarian ally.

The editorial further intimated thatI was a "totalitarian conservative"who justified many things in fascistcountries which I denounced in the So­viet Union. This was an absurd shin­der. I think I was one of the firstAmerican publicists who emphasizedthe many likenesses between Stalinismand Hitlerism. A chapter in "America'sSecond Crusade" is devoted to pointingout the many parallels between com­munism and fascism.

When I wrote a letter to the Postmaking these points, the editor, Mr.Wechsler, neither acknowledged norpublished it. Whatever may have beenWechsler's evolution since he quit theYoung Communist League, he does notseem to have outlived two Communisttraits: misrepresenting persons withwhom he disagrees, and refusing toallow them to vindicate themselves.

All these pseudo-liberals are not forfree trade in the market place of ideas.They are would-be monopolists. Andmuch of the uproar over the supposed"witch hunt," "black silence of fear,""reign of terror," etc. is the outcry ofwould-be left-wing thought monopolistswho see their cozy little intellectualcartel being challenged and broken up.

WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN

Cambridge, Mass.

had to flatter and support the rich andpowerful, but the point is that most ofthem seem to have been willing to. . . .

Since all history teaches that greatgovernment power leads to tyranny,one would expect the men in the col­leges, who know history best, would befound among those defending indi­vidual rights. Unfortunately, they seemto be on the other side. Perhaps theexplanation lies in the great numberof college professors who have foundpositions of prestige and power in theNew and Fair Deals.

Evanston, Ill. J. B. BOYLE

Professor E. Merrill Root's excellentarticle suggests that it might be timelyfor some one on your staff to write onthe political record of the scholarthroughout history. I have long feltthat- college instructors as a grouphave been treated with too much con­sideration. The average person's re­spect for learning is such that any op­portunist who surrounds himself witha university environment immediatelybecomes a pundit whose opinion on anysubject carries weight. We owe a tre­mendous debt to the philosophers andscientists, but I do not think it unfairto point out that they have been humanbeings like the rest of us. To eat wellduring the Middle Ages they may have

Brother" by students who abhorredthat sYlnbol as much as either Root or I.

In short, Root hasn't enough faithin the students themselves, and he defi­nitely errs in overrating the real effectof the teacher as a conserver and trans­mitter of values. The good or evil wedo is determined more by the youth weteach than by our Red colleagues.". . . gallant· youth will yet waken" isa stirring statement, but mistaken, foryouth isn't asleep. Furthern1ore, theirteachers are not sheep.Plainfield, Vt. JOHN C. PIERCE

Academic }'reedoln: Two View§

When E. Merrill Root sat down towrite "Our Left-Handed Colleges"[October 20], he lost his bearings.Then, like an amateur woodsman, hebecame panicky, then hysterical. Histhesis, that the liberals sometimes scoffthe conservatives of our colleges intosilence has more than a grain of truthin it, but not much more.....

As a professor in a college which islabeled "liberal" and not "McLiberal,"I resent Prof. Root's claim that I amcowed into conformity, eithel' by theRight or the Left. My library in myoffice has most of Robert Frost~, andnone of Ezra Pound; if I were ill' Lit.instead of Science, I would have tohave some Pound, so that my studentscould see for themselves his sterilenonsense. I do not use my "academicfreedom" to miseducate my students inScience and Living; like my studentsin Conservation of Natural Resourcesthey get a chance to look at all theimportant aspects of the problem, andthey usually come up with pretty sen­sible conclusions for themselves. Aschairman of the Senior Division, Iused to be called, jokingly I hope, "Big

Letters

Controversy Rages Anew

Was Henry George the founder of "Agrarian Communism" in America? Has thetotal communism ir..herent in his great masterpie-ce escaped until now even thekeenest of minds? Socionomist Spencer Heath s'ay.s: "Tax..slaves forfeit freedom forservitude; the future free-man will pay only the market-gauged site-rent value ofwhatever public services he receives." Tax-Lords versus Landlords! Judge for yourself!

Read Henry George',s PROGRESS AND POVERTY for the Land Communistargument and point of view. Then read the-ANSWER-in 26 pages of criticalreview ar..d clarification, showing Landlords and private property in land as Society'sfirst and last-its only ultimate defence-against total enslavement by the State.

John Dewey says of Henry George: "No man, no graduate of a higher educationalinstitution, has a right to regard himself as an educated man in social thought unless'he has some first-har..d acquaintance with the theoretical contribution of this greatAmerican thinker." Tolstoi, Helen Keller, Nicholas Murray Butler-all havewritten in similar and even stronger vein.

Yes,PROGRESS AND POVERTY is an appealing book. Grossly fallacious inits economic argument and inevitably totalitarian i:r: its proposed application, it isyet idealistic, rhetorical, poetical, ,beautiful-thus subtly deceptive-in its world-widerenown. Order your copy now at the special low price of $1.50 and you will receive,in addition, a free 'copy of its definitive expose, PROGRESS AND. POVERTYREVIEWED and Its Fallacies Expoeed, a 26-page booklet Iby Spencer Heath, LL.B.,LL.M.

214 THE FREEMAN

For your convenience, a Christmas gift orde'r form withadditional subscription blanks is bound into this issue.

Give you1r friends twenty-six Christmas gifts-twenty-six issues of the FREEMAN at our

special Christmas rates. Gift cards bearing your name will be mailed in time to arrive

before Christmas, and the subscriptions will start with the Christmas issue.

Why do our readers like the FREEMAN? This is what they say: Because it is scholarly

without being dull, informative without being didactic, critical without being bitter,

provocative without being irritating, amusing without being malicious. And because its

outlook on life is consistently that of the freeman.

Ple'Clse Bill me 0

StCite _

Enclosed $

Address _

NClme _

Your own name here

First one year subscription $4.50Two one year subscriptions .......•.. .........• $8.00Each additional one year subscription $3.50Special 3 month trial subscription $1.00

For Can\Jdian and Foreign, add $1.00

City Zone

Christmas Bells

Are Liberty Bells

Zone __StClte _

That's what we told you on our first Christmas, in 1950, and urged you to help keep

freedom ring'ing in America by giving the FREEMAN to your friends. In the two years

since then the FREEMAN has ste'odily grown in interest and influence. It has become

the strongest voice for freedom in Ame'rican iournalism.

City Zone __

The FREEMAN240 Madison Avenue

New York 16, N. Y.

Please enter gift subscriptions for each name I havelisted below:

Name _

Name _

Address _

City _

Address _

COMFORT AND SAFETY IN BODY DESIGN. To protect passengers,Chrysler safety all-steel bodies are especially designed with frame

and chassis for greater comfort and safety. New models affordgreater vision than ever, with narrower, yet sturdier, corner posts.

engineers and builds PLYMOUTH, DODGE, DE SOTO, CHRYSLER CARS &DODGE TRUCKS

HOW CHRYSlfR CORPORATION'S

CARS PROVIDE FOR YOUR SAFETY

CHRYSlfR CORPORATION

Safety in a car is not weight, or size, or bulk. Safety is sim­pLcity and ease of control, easy steering and safe, sure brakes.It is flexible, agile performance. It is strength in the compositedesign of the car as a whole.

Safety is the calm way your car meets the adverse road,or even the sudden blowout, as our Oriflow Shock Absorbersand Safety-Rim Wheels help it to do. It is the ready responseof your powerful engine. It is clear visibility, your viewthrough the panoran1ic windshield and deep side windows.Safety is even the Comfort-Level seats on which you can situpright, relaxed.

All of these Chrysler-engineered features are availableonly in Plymouth, Dodge, De Soto and Chrysler cars. Theyare exclusive Chrysler engineering ideas, the structural design,the care for hidden details, that give you extra measures ofsafety, comfort and peace of Inind.

Chrysler Marine & Industrial Engines • Oilite Metal Powder Products • Mopar Parts & Accessories • Airtemp Heating, Air Conditioning, Refrigeration • Cycleweld Cement Products

STUDIES OF WEIGHT DISTRIBUTION and its effect onspringing action led to the new, improved, truly bal­anced ride in Chrysler Corporation cars. Road bumpsare smoothed away and your ride is a safer one.

DRIVE WITH CONFIDENCE, without fear of blowout danger. Safety-RimWheels on Chrysler Corporation cars hold the deflated tire firmly onthe rim, so you can bring the car to a safe, controlled stop. Compareleft photo of blowout on ordinary rim with right photo of Safety-Rim.