Bernard Baruch

...Though Mrs...

...In treading on religious ground she has to expect to draw the lightning...

...Baruch had it...

...Mann and Proust did, and produced great works...

...Her summary of this much reported segment of American educational history is the most sensible short account I have seen...

...Ravitch gives the early progressive thinkers, and especially John Dewey, credit for urging a needed liberalization of teaching methods, she sees that the major role of progressive thought was to serve as the intellectual vehicle for the bureaucratization of the schools...

...Various women come to succor him...

...One's first thought is to go back to an author like Jane Austen, who apparently spent more time worrying about knitting patterns and Hampshire balls than about politics...

...Roth seems not to have gotten over it...

...all nuclear technologies and weapons to an international agency, under UN supervision...

...Baruch had many devoted friends, including journalists like Herbert Bayard Swope of the New York World (who wrote or touched up his speeches) and Arthur Krock, and General Pershing, whose financial affairs he handled from 1923 on...

...Roth, however, begins and ends with the selfabsorbed artist, whose gangrenous ego is bot e and milieu...

...22 cases of Clos du Cardinal, 34 of vermouth, 51 of Gordon's gin, 45 of Scotch, and 12 of champagne...

...He pushed a plan devised by David Lilienthal which inevitably became known, with no disclaimer on his part, as the Baruch Plan...

...The Bart~ch legend is grounded in the tribute Americans usually pay to men of, or reputed to have, financial genius...

...There is more on the nature and destiny of Western man in Mansfield Park than in any work yet to come out of a modern police state...

...Not that fame was the only source of his fame...

...backing but never got off the ground, was to turn over control of...

...Roth has shown he has the stuff of a good novelist...

...animosities, seems to notice...

...Baruch knew this...

...Naturally, he has writer's block...

...Roth tells interviewers that his worl is not autobiographical, but the article described in the novel bears a curious resemblance to one that Irving Howe wrote about Roth's work some years ago in Commentary...

...Totalitarian regimes, so goes the argument, give the novelist what he wants--a milieu where things really matter...

...Indeed Baruch was, as Grant puts it, "the despair of political taxonomists...

...After all it was Randolph, Calhoun and Jefferson Davis who insisted that the government in Washington leave the states alone...

...But it was in New York that he went to City College, then took up the pursuit of fortune on Wall Street...

...but it was obviously considerable, and Wilson valued it enough to offer him the Treasury in 1918...

...In order to find the tension which makes for a good story, he has to dig under the lax surface of a democratic society into business offices or artists' lofts or whatever, where he'll find plenty of what he wants...

...His last four novels, however, have made scant use of these gifts because their true subject is the narcissistic literary ego...

...Henry Ford's silly, anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent condemned him as the "proconsul of Judah in America...

...Introspection of this sort makes bad psychotherapy and worse fiction...

...But in emergencies he tended to make a virtue of necessity, especially what strong Presidents We lost...

...And historians like Mrs...

...No wonder some of them yearn for the external stimuli provided by a totalitarian regime...

...Now, there is nothing wrong with making a writer or artist the hero of a novel...

...Baruch cultivated an aura of blandness--"I am never quoted directly," he scolded once to a New Yorker writer who had quoted an uncharacteristically sharp remark about someone...

...Perhaps...

...About that same time, Mr...

...What is Nathan Zuckerman's main preoccupation when he isn't thinking about his ae~hing back...

...It had seemed the appropriate' great tome for the occasion, but strapped inert upon his narrow bed, Zuckerman grew increasingly irritated by Hans Castrop and the dynamic opportunities for growth provided him by TB...

...He also has a mysterious ailment which causes intolerable pain unless he remains fiat on hi~.back...

...Tom Wolfe has diagnosed the psychological basis of these grievances, and there is no need to dwell on the interior need of certain American intellectuals to feel persecuted...

...In New Deal days he supported the abrogation of the "gold clause" contracts, an inflationary move condemned by many bondholders...

...But his reach is a bit limited since a genius for making money, like artier forms of genius, is often a matter not of systematic calculation but of the exercise of elusive gifts of intuition...

...But somehow the whole that might spring from this lively mosaic of bits and pieces never quite comes into focus...

...His destiny as a financier had, it seems, been certified early and strangely...

...And as a sometime ardent Prohibitionist in the mid-1920s, Baruch nonetheless kept a cellar that included, among other holdings...

...ever sponsors an airlift to Rumania for American novelists, Philip Roth will be my candidate for the first shuttle...

...She reads tO him each day from The Magic Mountain...

...When reporters asked about the charges, Baruch, in one of his wittier moments, responded: "Now, boys, you wouldn't expect me to deny them, would you...

...Such are the salient features of the financial and public career of Bernard M. Baruch, man and "Wall Street legend...

...He would go on to make a great deal of money in mining and railroad stocks, losing some in the process and giving much away...

...How much better they would feel knowing that the jackboots from State Security were on their way...

...Everyone of a certain age remembers him, this adviser to Presidents, very rich (though not, it turns out, as rich as people often thought), a man who preferred a sunny bench in Lafayette Park to the corridors of power...

...Just what his contribution to the war effort was, beyond joining the cult of "'preparedness," is not clear...

...But writing a novel in which the main objective emotion of the hero is animus 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984...

...He was in no sense a dirigeiste in political economy...

...The progressives claimed to have made a science of pedagogy, and they were successful in selling that idea to the nation...

...The striking point was not the deal itself...

...Having made his fortune early, he sold his seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1917 and headed for Washington to fulfill the phrenologist's second augury--as a wartime administrator and committeeman specializing in industrial mobilization...

...He was a lifelong Democrat who gave lavishly to the party (almost $50,000 to the two Wilson campaigns, for instance) but he bolted to Eisenhower in 1952...

...The novel opens with Zuckerman stretched supine on a playmat in his study, his head supported by Roget's Thesaurus, watching Watergate on television through a pair of prism glasses that enable him to see at right angles...

...Grant chronicles them with a merry heart and a light touch, and is especially enlightening on the intricacies of stock speculation...

...Yet her special scorn is reserved for weakkneed faculty members and bumbling administrators who gave the agitators the ammunition they needed to win temporary support from student majorities who did not really agree with the radical aims...

...Their citizenry routinely faces the kind of moral dilemmas which are the stuff of good fiction and which the poor American novelist, dealing with a permissive democracy, cannot introduce into his work with a straight face...

...Madame Bovary could accommodate her adulteries in an Open Marriage or, at worst, she and Charles could attend a Creative Divorce workshop at the New School...

...Is it true that writers who live under repressiv e regimes, whether of the Right or the Left, have larger themes at their disposal than writers who live in democracies where, as the novelist here under consideration has put it, "everything goes and nothing matters...

...Every so often he publicly reiterated his standard advice: To get on, Americans must "work and save...

...Just about as good is her chapter on the rise and fall of progressive education, which I suspect will receive more attention than all other parts of the book put together...

...I f P.E.N...

...The idea, which enjoyed U.S...

...but he got no closer to his heart's ambition of being a railroad tycoon than the board of the B & O. viewed as necessity...

...He pontificated in that sense to Arthur Krock once, in opulent surroundings in Paris, while having a manicure...

...At its height, according to Grant's calculation, his worth was about $25 million (preinflation), which was somewhat reduced by the great crash of 1929, when he exercised his gift for selling short...

...His mother took him to a New York phrenologist who, after fingering Baruch's glabella, declared: " . . . My advice to you is to take him where they are doing big things-finance or politics...

...ckerman, novelist hero of the trilogy o vhich The Anatomy Lesson is, me ~ully, the conclusion, is interested only in his own needs and feelings...

...He was right...

...He declined, to go to Versailles with the peace delegation...

...Nearly twenty years after his death at 95 in 1965, Baruch continues to exhibit the strange opacity of those who are, as someone has wickedly put it, "famous for being famous...

...Unfortunately, most novelists these days seem too lazy to do this...

...Had he kept a pain diary, the only entry would have been one word: Myself...

...In quiet moments he deplored in principle what he had applauded in practice...

...THE ANATOMY LESSON Philip Roth/Farrar, Straus and Giroux/$14.95 George Sim Johnston I t has become the fashion among American novelists to envy their brethren in Eastern Europe...

...Grant's approach is sound, so far as it goes...

...They keep flailing away at America in book after book, and nobody, apart from those who already share their George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...

...But the issue is somewhat more complicated...

...One might argue, looking at her and James and Balzac, that moral sensitivity, not to mention sheer craftsmanship, is more important than a writer's political context...

...Her chapter entitled "From Berkeley to Kent State," for example, which recounts the campus uprisings of the sixties and seventies, is one of the more engaging sections of the book because it deals with specific acts, and because it allows the author to lay aside the mantle of historical objectivity, rise out of the mushy conclusions dictated by educational data, and say what she thinks...

...Now over 100 years later the Republic is still not entirely Reconstructed...

...His first killing on Wall Street, the unregulated fin-de-si~cle Wall Street, was to parlay $300 into $60,000 in sugar speculation...

...Baruch was too even-tempered, genial, and cautious to quarrel over mere policies...

...In Mann's novel, however, the whole sick crew is preoccupied with the central issues of Western civilization...

...But much of him was and remains hidden, like those old-fashioned high top Sears Roebuck shoes that a photc r chanced to see Baruch Edwin M. Yo , Jr...

...Like numerous other characters in contemporary American fiction (and, one is tempted to say, like their creators), Nathan tries to achieve self-knowledge in exactly the way that William James said is impossible: not by observing himself indirectly through action, but by sitting still and sending his thoughts like a diving bell down into the murky depths of his psyche in order to find his Real Self...

...If you're one of the hold-outs . . . THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 37 At the end of the Second World War, Harry Truman asked him to head the American delegation to the UN conference on atomic weapons...

...The blandness may or may not have been belied in private...

...The son, though transported to New York in 1881 as a lad, would always regard himself as a South Carolinian, never (according to Grant) lose his drawl, and much of the year keep house at his splendid Hobcaw barony in the Low Country...

...James Grant, a lively financial journalist, had the excellent idea of using Baruch's Wall Street adventures as a sort of aperture to the inner man...

...Ravitch who lifted the veil from the educational sanctum sanctorum will have made an important contribution...

...Davis" Vice-President Alexander Stephens reminded the country that the cause of the South was "'the cause of us all...

...His favorite playmate, Jenny, is one of those Perfect Women who keep showing up in Roth's fiction, the intriguing, literate, unassuming, mothering sexual acrobat who is ultimately too demanding for Roth's narcissistic literateurs...

...There, again, the record is somewhat murky...

...Consequently, long after their specific prescriptions had been set aside, the organizations they created continued to dominate the schools...

...At Versailles he had met John Maynard Keynes and disliked h i m - - not for his economic views but for his scalding sketch of Wilson as a canting Presbyterian in The Economic Consequences o f the Peace...

...The contradiction is classically summed up in one of his celebrated bromides: "The American people will take care of themselves if told what to do and why...

...In that piece, Howe made the case that Roth is a vulgar, minor satirist who "cannot, or ought not, hold the interest of a reasonably mature reader...

...Baruch, though in theory a hardmoney, free-market man, took an expansive view of wartime government...

...is a columnist f o r the Washin~,.vn Post and other newspapers...

...Grant here explores so entertainingly...

...it was the fact that Baruch, always a man of extraordinary generosity, gave almost all his gains away, to father and friends...

...Bernard Baruch came out of Reconstruction South Carolina, the son of a Camden doctor of some distinction who in his time had ridden with the Klan and would later become an ardent apostle of public baths...

...But the complaints themselves raise an intriguing question...

...An unpleasant article written about his work by a highbrow critic named Max Arpel...

...How many of the dilemmas portrayed in nineteenth-century fiction would make the slightest sense if transported, say, to the upper west side of Manhattan today...

...With such sentences does Roth try to give the impression that he is working a sidestreet of a ritzy literary neighborhood...

...He was teased about it in Hobcaw for years...

...P~re Goriot on Percodan or Valium ceases to be a plot catalyst...

...Even Updike, in his Bech books, works up an ironic distance which allows him to bring off some passing literary satire...

...He pours all sorts of invective on AppelHowe's head, calling him President of the Rabbinical Society for the Suppression of Laughter in the Interest of Loftier Values, to choose one of the politer (and somewhat accurate) epithets...

...Years after leaving the stock exchange, he would shrewdly say that the best book on the psychology of the market was an obscure historical tome, Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness o f Crowds...

...The rulers of these regimes, moreover, pay close attention to what writers have to say, and the writer, passing around his samizdat manuscripts in dimly lit cells while the snarling ideological watchdogs patrol outside, has the ticklish feeling that he is a part of History...

...But until we find the secret diary, or the set of indiscreet letters, all we have is the decorous, honorable record which Mr...

...The problem with legends in their own time is that they are sometimes hard reading, and none was harder than Bernard M. Baruch...

...In old age, he was heard to say wistfully that, had he wished, he could have been "really rich...

...So the Chair of the War Industries Board was to be his highest official perch in government...

...But their novels deal with extra-literary themes and social milieus, and these provide a mediating distance through which the reader approaches the selfabsorbed artist...

...In her analysis of upheavals at the University of California, Columbia, San Francisco State, Cornell, and Yale, she has little good to say about the student radicals, quoting with approval Eugene Genovese's designation of them as "pseudo-revolutionary middle class totalitarians...

...But that doesn't mean we've given up, The slender thread that connects the Founding Fathers to the present moment runs South, through the Confederate I~adition...

...Poor Doctorow and Coover and Piercy and Mailer...

...Their actions had significance because of the resistance of this atmosphere...

...Baruch, it seems, was never as rich as peol~le thought...

...A social order which seems to have abandoned most rules is, indeed, a more difficul~t number for a novelist...

...Healmost felt for Nixon, the only other American he saw daily who seemed to be in as much trouble as he was...

...Was there more to the legend than was seen, tucked away from sight like his sensible Sears Roebuck shoes...

...BERNARD BARUCH: THE ADVENTURES OF A WALL STREET LEGEND James Grant/Simon and Schuster/S19.95 Edwin M. Yoder, Jr...

...He was a man of the most episodic, often contradictory views...

...wearing one day while sitting crosslegged in the park...

...If Americans ever get up enough gumption to take back control of educational policy, and reintroduce the diversity that ought to characterize the schools of a free nation, it will be in part because they have understood the process by which the educational professoriate projected itself into power...

...They stick ~to their own turf, which is the academy or a street somewhere in suburbia, and when these exhaust their powers of observation, there is always the final subject, their own free-floating egos...

...The people in Jane Austen's world moved in a highly pressurized moral and social atmosphere...

...He once had a good eye for social detail, he still has an ear for vernacular, and he can be funny...