HANOVER BROWSING
OUT OF THE richness of his masterful experience Cardinal Richelieu in his Testament expresses the thought that "there are no persons more dangerous than those who want to rule kingdoms in accordance with the maxims they derive from the books they read . . . for the past has little bearing on the present, and the"constitution of times, places, and people, is always changing." The mixture of truth and half-truth embodied in this deliverance may aid in guiding my thought in connection with books dealing with the current world depression. I am aware how difficult it is to transcend the clamant problems associated with one's own time and place and culture. "The dust of my civilization is in my eyes" bemoans Anderson, and perhaps it is unfortunate that this is true of so many of us. A disconcerting limitation to fruitful thinking about contemporary things is the insidious tendency to allow subjective hopes and fears and preferences to dictate what that thinking is to be in range and quality. Objective thought is difficult when and where our own interests and emotions are in any way involved. But, after all, our understanding of the age and its problems is not gained so much by dialectics as by inner growth. We do not argue ourselves out of erroneous ideas nearly as much as we grow out of the old and into newer and ampler ideas. And these newer ideas are related organically to our ways of living. Occupations and professions condition men's beliefs and evaluations. Indeed they not infrequently determine them. This practical relation of living and thinking is the most stubborn characteristic of human thought. And college teachers, no more than others, are not insensitive to these practical exigencies of thought. Yet owing to the nature of our teaching work it should be easier for us to acquire a larger measure of objectivity in our thinking than is possible to the general run of human beings.
Living in a sequestered environment and engaged in a contemplative and protected occupation we have certain advantages when it comes to viewing detachedly the feverish, insecure human scene of to-day. We have a better chance of attaining objectiveness in our interpretations of modern problems than men living closer to these problems. Moreover, it is doubtless possible for a follower of the contemplative life to rest serenely in the relatively timeless world of thought when the world around him seems to be going to pieces. Not that I think that the world around me is really going to pieces, in spite of the mottled fears of many of the authors I have read in preparation for this month's column. Necessarily books about the depression are troubled by its pain and turbulence. For some time now I have been exposing myself to such a tremendous deluge of literature of indictment and fear that only the unhurried security of Hanover has saved me from either unrestrained pessimism or an unthinking but malicious optimism. In periods of violent changes and tempestuous crusades when all around us people seem to be losing their heads in panicky fear or intoxicated hope it is not too difficult for college teachers to keep their heads in their natural anatomical positions with a little more ease and grace.
Another thought comes home to me in a crisis like the one we are passing through, and that is that prophets of doom and trumpeters of new social orders must be taken with a liberal sprinkling of Attic salt. Those who predict confidently that Western civilization is going to the dogs forget—if they ever knew—that civilizations do not go to the dogs either easily or willingly. That is the last thing they do.
An equally salutary consideration arises out of the fact that civilizations and human nature being what they are it is not easy to rebuild the one or remake the other in a hurry. On the other hand what we know about culture does not allow us to be too skeptical of real possibilities of fruitful modifications. But even here it might be well to remember Cervantes' sage remark that "the road is always better than the inn." Part of the fun is in the attempt to remake or rebuild and not so much in the completion. Here also the road may be better than the inn. And in any case as a waggish old Church Father said "if we cannot control our own world we can at least contemplate the stars." Too many moderns have forgotten that liberating possibility.
DURING THE last year or two I have been trying to keep abreast of the best thought on various phases of the depression. I have been interested more particularly in the nature and quality of that thought. What sort of thinking is there about the whole matter? Does it do any more than merely skim the surface? Is there any depth to it? Or is a lot of it essentially shallow and timid?
These are some of the questions I have asked myself about it. I confess that much of the thought it has called forth is either defensively apologetic or violently critical. Some writers conclude that the depression is a sign of the approaching break-up of what is loosely called the capitalistic system, or at least an indication that it is no longer functioning in the efficient selfregulatory way it was supposed to have done in the nineteenth century. It is no longer delivering the goods. Capitalism has produced a planless, wasteful, chaotic and violent social order is the burden of their indictment. And what we are witnessing now is the dissolution of the system. Book after book seemed to take for granted that the economic system was collapsing. Some viewed the denouement with fear and trembling, while others exulted in the contemplation of what they regarded as the death pangs of an anarchic social order. Some diagnosed the disease as incurable, others held out a glimmer of hope but only under certain conditions. And many prescribed elaborate remedies of doubtful value. A somewhat similar medley of diagnostic and therapeutic suggestions and prescriptions was evidenced even in books written by experts. And often the story told about Dr. Osier came to my mind. He was asked once which of the dozen or more of the advertised remedies for influenza was the most effective. His illuminating reply was that if a patient took any one of the dozen—and nothing untoward happened in the meantime—he could expect to recover in seven days, but if he took none of them—and nothing untoward happened in the meantime—he probably would get well in a week. This Oslerian philosophy is of some comfort to a reviewer overwhelmed by a multiplicity of curative suggestions and plans.
Nevertheless there is a fair measure of agreement concerning some things in the books I have read. One was the tendency to interpret the crisis as one of impoverishment in plenty. It is a case of poverty in plenty repeats J. A. Hobson in two or three of his recent books, or, as Leech in the Paradox of Plenty phrases it, it is a crisis arising out of the fact that for the first time in economic history we have passed from a regime of scarcity to one of plenty. This suggests an idea similar to Simon Patten's pain economy and a pleasure economy. Sir Arthur Salter in his excellent book called Recovery (one of the best) says that "Ours is the problem of the impoverishment that comes from plenty. It comes from defects in human organization and direction, from imperfect planning, from weakness in our financial and distributive systems—from essentially remediable evils and essentially removable causes." That is a modest and reassuring statement.
A related idea is presented by Keynes in Essays in Persuasion where he informs us that "the Economic Problem ... is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and an unnecessary muddle. For the Western world already has the resources and the technique, if we could create the organization to use them, capable of reducing the Economic Problem, which now absorbs our moral and material energies, to a position of secondary importance." Keynes is more brilliant than Salter or Gregory but sometimes not so steady. However, his economic hunches have the habit of coming true. From the point of view of both Keynes and Salter our present distress has as many elements of hope as of discouragement, and more so if Keynes is right in his assumptions.
A stimulating and provocative book by the Spanish critic, Jose Ortega Y Gasset, entitled The Revolt of the Masses expresses the same thought as that of Keynes. "We live," he repeats, "at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. ... He feels himself lost amid his own abundance. With more means at his disposal, more knowledge, more technique than ever, it turns out that the world of to-day goes the same way as the worst of worlds that have been; it simply drifts." This book is not on the depression but on the coming to ascendancy of the masses, and on what happens to the quality of social life as a result of this disturbing phenomenon. Not a great book but worth reading.
Soule in A Planned Society, one of the most thoughtful discussions of this subject, says that "there may be obstructions in our institutions, habits and desires, but not in our equipment, skill and intelligence." The first part of Soule's book is interesting because he is concerned with the intellectual background of modern life, and planning must be done in that general cultural setting.
President Aydelotte of Swarthmore in the preface to that admirable study of The Problem of Unemployment by Douglas and Director strikes the same note of poverty in plenty. "The failure of our industrial organization to function smoothly, the fact that men must starve because they have produced too much food, or go naked because they have produced too many clothes, or sleep in the parks because they have built too many houses—this failure is fraught with the gravest consequences to the security and well-being of all industrial states." Another little book on unemployment we can recommend is Prof. Graham's. I do not think he has thought through his plan to the extent demanded. Just the same his suggestions are helpful. A book called Insuring The Essentials by B. Armstrong is equally worth studying.
Stuart Chase also stresses the same aspect of the depression in two or three of his recent books—especially in The Nemesis of American Business, and in that readable and lucid discussion in his New Deal.MANY OTHER writers emphasize this paradox of plenty in addition to those mentioned. But here a person is tempted to ask what are the causes of this poverty in plenty? The modern man naturally looks for the causes of things. The general methodology of the sciences and the übiquity and matter-of-factness of the impersonal type of relations found in our technological culture prejudice us in favor of a search for causes. Charlotte Bronte in Shirley makes one of her characters say: "Them that's mechanics like me is forced to think. Ye know, what wi' looking after machinery and sich like, I've gotten into that way that when I see an effect I look straight for a cause." By the way that is a good illustration of how one's ways of living influences one's habits of thought. But this looking straight for a cause is not quite so simple as it appears. The books I have read seem to have a lot of difficulty on that score. Many of them it is true imply that the main cause is the absence of co-ordination and direction in the economic system. This indictment of lack of plan is general. And some of them discuss pertinently this planlessness of our social order. The best of these are the following:
1. The New Deal: Stuart Chase. Three or four of the other books by Chase deal also with this matter of waste and lack of plan.
2. A Planned Society: George Soule.
3. America Faces The Future: Charles Beard, editor. This book contains a number of plans including the Swope Plan.
In the New Deal Chase turns his accounting mind on the absence of systematic planfulness in the economic order. He makes out a good case for the necessity of introducing the logic of planning into it if it is to survive "What we must never forget," he expatiates, "is that in an economic system without co-ordination, control, or a sense of function, occupations are bound to collapse under us."
Similarly Soule informs us that "unless our society is to disintegrate and go back to a more primitive state, unless it is to abandon machine technology, it must plan and control itself as a whole." That is a fairly large order, especially when he adds to it an additional demand for world planning if we are to find complete solutions for our economic problems. We might retort that moderately satisfying provisional solutions would be acceptable as a beginning. At the same time we cannot but assent to Soule's statement that "The idea of organization, of planning, of research, of co-operation—will be recognized as the way of salvation for industrial society." This more modest demand is implied by Hoxie in Men, Money and Mergers. "We likewise may be confident that after some turmoil there will come precisely the collaborative philosophy which is needed as a basis for planning more effective cooperation."
This plea for planfulness is not limited to liberal critics like Chase or Soule or Beard or Frederick. It is voiced also by writers like Dean Donham of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. His Business Adrift and his BusinessFaces The Unforeseen call loudly for planfuless. "We must," he exclaims, "have a philosophy, a plan, and a method of thinking about the future," or, "what we need is effective and rationally foresighted leadership culminating in philosophically sound planning." We agree with Dean Donham on this point, but we confess to a certain persistent doubt concerning some of the elements in his own philosophy and plan. There are dubious if not harmful points in both. What he says about tariffs and the protection of social groups and export trade is open to serious criticism. Despite this we can recommend his contributions-to the subject. And as we are likely to be bothered by tariff discussions in the not too distant future I can recommend highly Sir William Beveridge's Tariffs: The Case Re-examined. An older book written in 1916 by J. Gruntzel with the title Economic Protectionism is worthy of some attention.
Among a host of other economists pleading for a logic of planfulness are Edie, Fairchild, James, Ohlin, Webb, Tawney, Patterson, Hansen, Wagemann, Renatus, Layton, Clay, Phillips.
We find the same faith in a planned economy in the recent works of some of our radical critics. Among the best of the American group are Norman Thomas' America's Way Out and As I See It. A more significant and able discussion from a moderate socialistic point of view is G. D. H. Cole's A Guide Through theWorld Chaos. (Knopf.) Cole is always penetrating and pungent in his criticisms and he also possesses an enviable gift for popular exposition. However, I shall have to postpone discussing these socialistic books to a future issue.
AMONG THE left wing radicals in America I think the best expressions of their uncompromising revolutionary ideas and attitudes are Scott Nearing's Must WeStarve; Foster's Toward Soviet America, and Theodore Dreiser's Tragic America. These books are interesting reading if one is desirous of understanding the extreme radical philosophy and militant ideas and strategy. The best of the three is Nearing's book, although in some sections Foster's discussion is better than I anticipated. Dreiser's is a curiously uneven and a somewhat unbalanced and unfair treatment of the American Scene. It glows fiercely with the fervor of a new convert to the faith of communism, but it lacks the steadier balance and philosophy of an old believer. In my opinion these three books are at bottom, and sometimes at top, unfair and essentially illiberal. I expect liberalism in a liberal, a certain magnanimity of mind although it may be accompanied by an unmistakable intellectual hardness and forthright criticism. But I do not find it here, least of all in Dreiser. Foster also has an aggravating dose of illiberality and suspiciousness in his makeup. I cannot see any justification for this. Upton Sinclair in some of his pamphlets and books reveals a kindred unfairness and distorted criticism. It is not so much what they say but the way they say it. And very often it is what they do not say but should say. I enjoy reading a keen, hard, intellectually biting radical critique of modern life, written by a man with brains and backbone and without any iota of sympathy for either our papescent romantic illusions or our timid defensive rationalizations. But I do not like a radical book full of illiberal innuendoes and unfair comments and distorted facts and interpretations. And there is too much of that in Dreiser's Tragic America and Foster's Toward Soviet America, and even Nearing's Must We Starve is not free from unworthy traits of this nature.
The worst enemy of radicalism in America are certain American radicals. I realize that books of this nature are designed primarily as contributions to a class-war technique and philosophy and policy. Their authors are really on the track of capitalism. It is a war or a hunt with them, and their intellectual tactics are undisguisedly militant tactics. But my point is those tactics lead to sterility, particularly so in America. While reading these books as carefully as they allowed me a passage from G. R. Rice's My AdventuresWith Your Money came to my mind. Rice was an expert financial racketeer, peculiarly adept at separating what is called high-class speculative fools from their money. The book tells us how he did it. And in one passage he shows his grasp of the psychology of the speculative public. "Attracted," he says, by the seeming activity and rising prices and publicity, the public listens to reason, as it thinks, but it is not reason that it listens to. It listens to a battery of 'dynamiters.' " That is a racketeering gem. I am afraid that I also was not listening to reason but to a battery of dynamiters. This may be harsh criticism but I think both Dreiser and Foster deserve it. If we are to have Leninists in America, by all means let us have the brains and the knowledge and the iron will and the prevision of Lenin.
At the same time there are enough ugly facts, in American life to-day to give point to some of the criticisms in these books. Their authors also call for a socialized and planned economy, accompanied by a strident denial that capitalism is able to plan. "Socialism in the Soviet Union works with a plan," states Foster, "because its whole nature calls for planfulness and system. Capitalism has never developed a plan in any country, because it is in its very substance planless, competitive, chaotic." And even liberal-minded Mr. Soule has to make the same denial. "Capitalism is fundamentally unsystematic, that is its chief characteristic. Anything which introduces an element of conscious system into it changes it, not merely in degree but in kind." Equally positive is Scott Nearing. "The capitalist class is prevented by its system of organization from planning on a world-wide scale." And in the white ardor of his new born faith Mr. Dreiser bursts out: "Therefore, as I see it, nothing but a fundamental change in the whole system can do it. The present foundation is crumbling; the weakness is basic, absolutely at bottom and cannot be patched up or repaired."
IN ADDITION to those viewing the depression as poverty in plenty and stressing the dire need of co-ordination and planful direction in our civilization, we have a number of informing books explaining the crisis as another instance of an unexplainable periodicity in modern economic society. It may be of greater magnitude, range and intensity, or even duration than depressions in the past. But at bottom it is similar in nature. Perhaps the best expression of this point of view is found in Hansen's first-rate study of EconomicStabilization in an Unbalanced World. With Salter's Recovery, and Ohlin's League of Nations report on The Course andPhases of the World Economic Depression, Cole's Guide Through World Chaos, and the more difficult two-volume Treatise OnMoney by Keynes, I regard Hansen's book as among the best discussions of the depression. Two other general books worth reading are Dennis' Is Capitalism Doomed and M. J. Bonn's The Crisis of CapitalismIn America. Another intriguing but not quite convincing book is Dahlberg's Men,Machines, and Capitalism. But to return to Hansen. His position is slightly different. He does not stress so much the desideratum of stability. "We may quite conceivably find it increasingly apparent as time goes on," he argues, "that a high degree of stability can easily be purchased at too great a cost in terms of freedom and progress." This is obviously true. We may plan for a number of things besides stability. We may make the maximum degree of freedom or happiness of the greatest number or the utmost tempo of cultural change the objectives of our planning. After all a plan must have reference to objectives as well as means. On the general nature of the depression Hansen's position is that "The current depression constitutes one link in the long chain of major depressions. It requires, in so far, no explanation other than the general theory of the business cycle as such. The exceptional severity of the depression however, is to be explained partly by the drastic deflation of prices, partly by certain structural changes in the capitalistic system, and partly by a special combination of circumstances growing out of the post-war readjustments." And in his answer to the question of what can we do about it he gives little encouragement to economic romanticism. "We shall not succeed," he tells us, "in solving the depression through the soothing and agreeable device of inflation. We shall come out of it only through hard work, and readjustments that are painful. There is no other alternative. And we shall have to face the probability of having to repeat the process in future, since on balance, a downward trend in prices is likely." That conclusion appears to me to be basically sound, although I think it logically points to the wisdom of formulating programs which can be put into practice in the next few years, so that we may be better prepared to meet future eventualities of the kind intimated. Recovery is not likely to be easy, but with Salter I think "it is not beyond finding and following." A few recommended books among the many dealing with the recurrent rhythms and periodic crises of our economic system are the following: 1. W. Mitchell's Business Cycles: The problem and its setting. 2. Hansen's Business Cycle Theory. 3. Pigou's Industrial Fluctuations. 4. Wagemann's Economic Rhythms. 5. Business Cycles and Business Measurements. Snyder. These are a little difficult but worth the attention of the student.
THE TENDENCY among British writers on the depression is to emphasize the monetary aspects and factors of the situation. Keynes is a well-known and brilliant expounder of this point of view. His Essaysin Persuasion are worth perusing even at this late day. And to the serious student of monetary problems his two-volume Treatise On Money is indispensable. I admit to an inability to see eye to eye with him in some respects. Some of his positions it seems to me are questionable and open to criticism. He is inclined to narrow his discussion of economic problems a little too severely. This comes out even in a statement like the following: "The fluctuations of trade and employment are at the same time the greatest and the most remediable of the economic diseases of modern society . . . they are mainly diseases of our credit and banking systems."
Other British economists singling out the monetary factors in the crisis are D. H. Robertson, Hawtrey, and Gregory. I personally like Robertson's little book on Money. And Gregory's book on The GoldStandard and Its Future is excellent. On the whole he is more steady than Keynes. But also less brilliant. Cassel, the Swedish economist, has this to say in his recently published Rhodes Lectures; "the present crisis is a direct consequence of the war debts and of the maldistribution of gold connected with their payment." Renatus, the German economist, views it as "a crisis of capital inflation." In the United States, Edie tends to stress credit factors. In TheBanks and Prosperity he advances the idea that "orderly credit control or disintegration—that is the alternative now put to central banks and to capitalism." But perhaps the most thorough-going and critical American book on this aspect of the question is Prof. Rogers' America Weighs HerGold. It contains a great deal of biting criticism and helpful interpretation. James's The Road to Recovery is not a bad book either. Another study worth reading is P. W. Martin on Maintaining PurchasingPower. I cannot say that I am convinced by the reasoning of Foster and Catchings or of Mazur or by other similar writers, so I can recommend their books only with reservations.
BEFORE I conclude may I suggest reading the original articles of W. H. Smyth in Industrial Management (1919), in which he pleads for what he calls Technocracy. And if we are to have more cooperative integration and socialized direction of our economic and social institutions in the future I suggest a combination of Smyth's Technocracy and what has been called Sociocracy. This is something which is a part of the great tradition in the social thinking of the nineteenth century from St. Simon through Comte and down to Lester F. Ward. In the last few years we have seen the deflation of many of our business and political leaders. This was perhaps a painful but necessary process. Yet we want intelligent and courageous leadership. But that leadership must be guided by a reliable body of verifiable social knowledge. In a recent speech by Stalin he was reported as saying that "To lead means to foresee, and to foresee, comrades, is not always so simple." This is as revealing an insight into Stalin's difficulties as I have glimpsed for some time. But in society this prevision must grow out of a cumulative and fruitful body of social knowledge. And to contribute to that is the major task of all the social sciences. I cannot refrain from drawing this month's column to a close by a long but apposite quotation from G. B. S. Haldane, for in the language of the old Irish lady "Them are my thoughts too." "Science can do something far bigger for the human mind than the substitution of one set of beliefs for another. ... It can gradually spread among humanity as a whole the point of view that prevails among research workers, and has enabled a few thousand men and a few dozen women to create the science on which civilization rests. For if we are to control our own and one another's actions as we are learning to control nature, the scientific point of view must come out of the laboratory and be applied to the events of daily life. It is foolish to think that the outlook which has already revolutionized industry, agriculture, war, and medicine, will prove useless when applied to the family, the nation, or the human race. . . . But until the scientific point of view is generally adopted, our civilization will continue to suffer from a fundamental disharmony. Its material basis is scientific; its intellectual framework is pre-scientific. The present state of the world suggests that unless a far more vigorous attempt is made in the near future to remedy this disharmony, our particular type of civilization will undergo the fate of the cultures of the past. Those who consider that it is worth saving should realize the kind of effort which is necessary and the kind of opposition which that effort will encounter."
