Current Styles in Muckraking

...The Erie County Department of Welfare has a Monthly Budget Schedule that provides, for example, that a boy 13-17 years old in a household of two is allowed $42.40 for food prepared in the home...

...May says that a study of ADC families showed that "in seven states more than half the families were getting the wrong amount of assistance...

...One learns, for instance, of the fantastic possibilities of creating "tax shelters" in real estate manipulation, and of the many stratagems available for the perpetuation of great fortunes...

...For one thing, he doesn't deny the dangerous existence of Russian armed force...

...In the main, two ways of coping with this state of mind have been adopted: either the author addresses himself to administrative reforms of a narrowly pragmatic nature, or he discerns in the problems with which he has been concerned an aspect of publicity (or myth or obscurity or bad reporting...

...And, although the book carries an admiring preface by J. K. Galbraith, Nossiter has a number of appropriately harsh things to say about the doctrine of countervailing power, in the course of which he summarizes the important evidence for believing that neither unions nor retail units effectively "countervail" against corporate pricing and profit decisions...

...They are all markedly uneasy about their audiences, however, and this becomes most evident in their remedial proposals, which are, without exception, devoid of visionary promise...

...In a chapter on General MacArthur ("King Mac"), and in a discussion of the military academies, he explores the military caste system and observes that it often fails within its own terms, since it produces men who are "excellent in strutting, posing, and phrasing," but whose "genius is scant" in the coarser business for which they have been trained at considerable public expense—killing, maiming, and crushing an enemy...

...his book is basically an extended essay in support of a reasonable suspicion of military claims...

...but they neither invite nor expect the actual participation of those they are addressing...

...His rhetoric takes into account a national interest that is defined mostly in terms of the efficient management of aggregate resources...

...In 1960 May worked in the Welfare Department of Buffalo, initially in order to gather material for a series of newspaper articles...

...his book consequently depends too much on raw data, unmediated by an argument that meets non-pacifist opinions, for it to have much persuasive impact on nonbelievers...

...The reality may in fact be quite different, for a heavy cynicism seems to afflict American politics, suggesting that it is quite possible for institutions to survive unadorned by the myths or ideologies formerly attached to them and once thought necessary for their preservation...

...Much of the material supplements one's vague conviction that welfare procedures are cruel, intrusive, and ra tional only in the manner of the offi cials of The Castle...

...a girl in similar circumstances gets $36.50 according to this splendidly precise calculation...

...For deficits in the balance of payments, he offers some familiar liberal remedies...

...The in stitutional literature emitted by business," he argues, disguises the dominant role of non-competitive large corporations, the increasing concentration of assets, and the calculation of prices according to a "target rate of return...

...Yet at the end he recommends what is, in effect, merely a simplified tax law of universal application...

...These assumptions naturally issue in administrative and publicity remedies because they operate at the level of images rather than of social actions or ideas...

...through direct intervention in politics (he describes the Air Force campaign against Senator Margaret Chase Smith...

...Yet, quite apart from specific flaws in his program (his monetary proposals, for example, have only a peripheral bearing on the enormous foreign exchange problems of the poor countries), one gets no sense that Reuss sees any way of convincing a large audience that his practical notions are worth supporting because they serve a greater political good...

...The real trouble with Packard's book is that it deals with its symbolic material on a conventional literal level...

...The tax savings (assuming the $3 million passes, each time, to an only child...

...These assumptions, in brief, are that journalism (whatever its medium) is a major part of the electoral system...

...we have come a long way from the days of the American Celebration...

...for as the important questions of public policy have become more complex and remote from everyday experience, journalism has come to play a larger role in our political life...

...Both the administrative and the publicity approaches partake of the fashionable anti-populism of the past decade in a curious way...

...Their presumptive audiences, moreover, do not include those whose interests are directly affected in a simple sense, nor is it suggested that readers will directly confront the subjects or objects of discourse: the poor are dealt with by social workers, we encounter taxes through paper forms, the military operate on a grand scale, and countermyths about economics do not seem to touch either the nature of work or the commercial values of our culture...

...622,000 by skipping one generation, nearly a mil lion by skipping two generations...

...He starts, in a sense, with what Swomley excludes, for he finds that "The real enigma is, What has happened to the American objection to a huge military establishment...

...that journalism-politics does not so much either promote or destroy association as short-circuit it...

...Tristram Coffin, in The Passion of the Hawks (Macmillan, $5.95), defers not at all to military pretense, but avoids pacifist absolutism...

...Edgar May's The Wasted Americans (Harper and Row, $4.50) is not only more certainly in the muckraking tra dition, but has more to do with the purposes of politics, for it is about what the state does for and to the poor through its welfare programs...

...Perhaps because some crusading books on poverty have been criticized for their inattention to statistical data, May has attempted to weave such information into his argument, along with references to his own experiences, a his tory of the attacks on welfare in New burgh, N.Y., accounts of bureaucratic procedures and structures in various parts of the country, a discussion of the contraception-information dispute, and a few excerpts from tape-recorded conversations with relief recipients and officials...

...It is as if these writers, having begun their books with the certainty that hidden truth, once exposed, would set free a collective sense of responsibility, had gradually come to believe half-consciously that such a sense either did not exist, or could not translate itself into effective action...

...Philip M. Stern, in The Great Treasury Raid (Random House, $5.95), apparently intends to let us see the Internal Revenue Code as a model of our economy's weird structure...

...Mayer's lawyer, Ellsworth C. Alvord, appearing not in his capacity as a private attorney but as the official spokesman of the United States Chamber of Commerce...

...It took twenty four separate pieces of paper to give one of my relief recipients her first check...

...In seventeen chapters with such titles as "Ah, To Be an Oil Man," "Living High at the Taxpayers' Expense," and "How to Get Rich Quick in Real Estate—With Uncle Sam's Help," Stern combines summaries of tax court and administrative decisions with statistics, hypothetical cases, and mock-serious advice on how to avoid taxes...

...here the grandiose claims of business schools are tellingly contrasted with the actual practices of managers when it comes to price-fixing and their own remuneration...

...This book deals clearly with the most widely believed set of myths, those purporting to explain economic affairs in terms of balanced budgets and supposed inflationary menaces, or promoting a false notion of "neutrality" in labormanagement disputes...

...the 342 pages of this book amount to a miscellany of shocking facts concerning those impersonal forces that frighten comfortable middle-class families with the threat of physical and psychological manipulation...

...So dedicated is he to the Treasury's interests, in fact, that one wonders whether some of his readers might not be encouraged to lend their resentment to the wrong cause, by vicarious participation in privilege rather than through redress in fair taxation...

...He makes use of academic studies and Congressional reports to show that this pricing procedure means that many great corporations predetermine their rate of profit on the basis of an average volume of sales and probably don't lower their prices when sales fall...

...On points (4) and (5) Packard has unfamiliar information...

...Do these six books, which may be taken to represent current styles in muckraking, have anything in common...

...Similarly, Nossiter argues, with great clarity and concision, that the Kennedy administration was actively friendly to business...

...Beyond that the new muckrakers do not go...

...The Naked Society, by Vance Pack and (McKay, $5.95), doesn't go much beyond newspaper clippings about in vasions of privacy...

...man for the poor and supervisory delegation to them...

...Any company that hopes to be known as a decent place to work should completely eliminate lie detectors," Packard says, but his real message is the old one of Babbittish cynicism: trust no one, for there is no decency...

...The effect is to convey the influence of the law on economic behavior of the most complexly useless sort...

...The business conscience, whose theoretical advent was so widely announced a few years ago, is, in practice, a mite beneath detection...

...And since the important question is, after all, the way in which tax policy should contribute to a sensible economic and social policy, it is not enlightening to conclude with splashes of rhetoric about being better off "with a free play of market forces" and the suggestion that the tax laws aren't as important as people think...

...Where Swomley appeals vaguely to the political standard of "the kind of civilian government envisioned by our founding fathers," while apparently assuming that all military endeavor is morally untouchable, Coffin invokes moral values that can be linked to personality, and he accomplishes this by commenting on political policies mainly as they are exemplified by specific individuals...

...If journalism and politics largely over lap, then a change in journalistic images becomes a change in political reality...

...one notices in the responses to the new muckraking books a tendency to regard them as symbols of accomplishment, as if discussion were the same thing as reform...

...But all these serve mainly as sensible aspects of an unambitious program that suits the current national style and softens difficult conflicts of interest...

...The defects of The Great Treasury Raid stem from the excess of Stern's passion for good taxation...

...But one wonders whether May hasn't been led afield in his consideration of positive proposals by the socialworkers' own explanations of themselves, for it would seem to be inherently impossible that a profession be recognized with appropriate trust as both spokes...

...To a considerable extent, then, Coffin convinces because he attempts to counterbalance military propaganda rather than to suggest that we don't need a military establishment of any kind...

...At the grandchildren's death, the $3 million itself would pass to the greatgrandchildren...

...However, he says, "the fake-caseworker role wore off in the early weeks," and he conceived his book as "an attempt to get Americans excited about a large group of their fellow citizens who are unknown to some and who may have been overlooked by others...

...In one instance, remarkable chiefly because it is so clearly demonstrable, a special section of the tax law was passed to save money for the odious Louis B. Mayer...

...He says, for example, that cost-plus defense contracts permit corporations to include advertising as a business expense, which is interesting, but then he confuses the matter by vaguely hinting that such benefits induce the press to favor the military...

...and through the "military-industrial complex...

...while he acknowledges qualitative standards, he seems to shroud them in legal paper...

...All of their authors would probably call themselves "liberals," and they are all clearly dissatisfied with the state of American society...

...one does no violence to Stern's revelations to conclude that the general rule is that the less direct the connection between the taxpayer's own efforts and his income, the greater will be the profit allowed to him...

...In The Critical Decade: An Economic Policy for America and the Free World (McGraw-Hill, $5.50), Congressman Reuss offers brave slogans ("we must become once again, not a chosen people, but a choosing people"), and demonstrates that he has a firm grasp of the details of legislation...

...worthwhile as it is, that program seems to perpetuate the dole in dependence on ambition's ethic...

...It will be difficult for Nossiter's readers to view presidential interventions in threatened strikes with the simple trust in appearances that newspaper reports seem to demand, for he takes up the steel price case and shows, quite simply by calling attention to the sequence of important events, that the purpose of President Kennedy's mispublicized intervention was to strengthen his hand in urging restraint on the unions, and that this purpose stemmed from a mistaken view of the need for such anti-inflationary action...

...But journalism has not operated in its traditional way, remarked upon by de Tocqueville, to initiate direct association among like-minded people...

...and a general riff-raff of local Chamber of Commerce secretaries...

...Surrogates to the poor for a society that contaminates pity with censure, socialworkers try to mold the contradictory aspects of their function into a bearable way of life with the aid of an elaborate professional mystique...

...The facts are lucidly stated, although May has tried too hard to be "interesting" in the man ner of reporters...

...He recognizes the difficulty of establishing his "no-preference tax system," but his overt appeal is to abstract principles of consistency and formal equality of treatment, and he affects to believe that obscure language is the major obstacle to reform...

...that we act upon one another politically by silently choosing opinions which are at once formed by and expressed through journalism...

...Yet he does make sense out of headlines about Pentagon influences that work in three major ways: through a Congressional-military alliance, which he pins down with an appalling list of Senators and Representatives who have been given military titles and privileges (Keating is a Brigadier General in the Army reserve, Goldwater a Major General in the Air Force...

...Swomley supplies an abundance of detail, but the information he gives—based largely on newspaper reports and Congressional documents— doesn't prove his conspiracy theory, since he seems to regard effects as self-evident proofs of causes...

...Nor does Stern pretend that such measures, which permit tax avoidance behind a facade of high taxation, are merely accidental defects in some impartial grand design...

...Those who are looking for detailed, documented information won't get it from Coffin...

...it has, instead, given us a picture of the world that calls forth a concerted response —if at all—only indirectly, at elections or in public opinion polls...

...it would be silly to object to better reporting of welfare activities, and we do need bigger welfare budgets, vocational training program, more social workers, and perhaps even the teaching of home economics to bad housekeepers...

...He points out that it makes little sense to correct the American deficit without touching the chaotic state of international monetary practices...

...He tells us, for example, of the Wackenhut Corporation, "the fourth largest investigative and security organization in the nation, with a staff of 3500, complete with a lie-detector division," and he gives an estimate of the cost of eavesdropping apparatus ("Picture frame transmitter, $15...

...The first of these, John M. Swomley, Jr.'s The Military Establishment (Beacon, $6.00), is partly a history of conscription, the peacetime enactment of which the author ascribes to a long campaign by military men, and partly a general attack on military power...

...It may be an oversimplification to say "The Civil War smashed like the blundering breath of a hurricane the concept of a small standing army, for the Union had no force to put down armed rebellion," but the idea is more helpful to understanding than are the moralizing notions of so many other anti-military polemicists...

...Swomley's intentions are good, but his pacifism leads him to find almost any fact about the military to be shocking...

...One of the important thing's to emerge from May's book, perhaps unintentionally, is the strangely ambiguous role of the social workers...

...Efficiency...

...he has, in fact, a chilling section on the Soviet army and its probable impact on Russian foreign policy...

...The book will probably have some unobjectionable consequences if it reaches the businessmen most directly affected by its proposals—after all, who benefits from muddle?—and it may help to promote an alliance of liberal Democrats and enlightened managers...

...The value of muckraking that does more than supplement newspapers is illustrated by a book that sets out to correct deceptive ideas rather than to present previously unknown facts, Bernard Nossiter's The Mythmakers (Houghton-Mifflin, $4.00...

...gress and to business managers), and, in the manner of a campaign platform, endorses a suitable course of action...

...Packard's tone and content often recall such Riesman-oriented exposes of the fifties as The Organization Man...

...There is nothing grievously wrong with this approach, which is emotionally based on an understandable reaction against both messianic ideologies and politically passive anti-ideologies (except that it leaves much by default to conservative agitation...

...Nossiter is particularly good at ridiculing the idea that business prattices have improved significantly because managements have become more responsive to public opinion...

...lawyers, and the like...

...However, most of Swomley's argument is built up out of such items...

...and he surveys the nation's military history with broad strokes of a rhetoric that forces one to recognize the complex interaction of military means and political ends...

...He makes it clear that both the "favored few" (stockholders, owners of municipal bonds, etc...

...In short, these writers seem to be enlisting the support of a liberal, middleclass audience for policies that are to be carried out by existing elites...

...This sort of bald statement of the military function is central to Coffin's persuasive strategy...

...His answer is vague, but he gives us a sense of the soldier's mentality and of the setting in which it operates, as well as a notion of the realities of power politics...

...The point might well be overlooked if it were incidental, or it might be worth making in a context of tighter argument...

...Stern's chapter on this gives the law, a "layman's translation," and a brief history of the amendment, which was presented to the Senate Finance Committee "by Mr...

...Throughout, Reuss's approach fol lows a similar pattern: he identifies a problem (foreign aid, low growth rate, Common Market competition, unemployment, incoherence in tariff structures), gives a brief account of its background (largely in terms of the administrative defects of the institutions created to deal with it), states various alternatives that seem practical (i.e., that stand a chance of appealing to Con...

...May's ideas are good...

...They take up neglected problems, oppose conventional banalities, and challenge powerful forces...

...Stern's salient merits are to cover the field thoroughly and, I think, accurately, while emphasizing the operation of the law in specific instances...

...None of these authors is conspicuously in favor of egalitarian, or anti-capitalist, or socialist, or anarchist radicalism of any kind, and few pay much attention to what has been done in other countries, for better or worse, to deal with analogous problems...

...His basic idea, not notably ambitious, is to supplement the existing reserves available to meet demands on particular currencies by (a) accepting a Congressional committee proposal that would have the major Western powers lend specified amounts to the International Monetary Fund for the purpose of relieving deficits among themselves, and (b) adding to this fund by requiring countries with surpluses to grant a certain amount of credit to deficit countries...

...Its purpose would be chiefly to promote a higher rate of economic growth, which our failure to achieve he carefully isolates as the main cause of present unemployment...

...Mayer saved about $2 million...

...his evidence includes, in addition to the steel case, the administration's tax and trade bills, and its use of military expenditures as an eco nomic stimulant...

...but he does not bring these details into a fruitfully close conjunction with the slogans...

...A book by one of the best of liberal Congressmen, Henry Reuss of Wisconsin, makes one wonder further whether the current definitions of Congressional issues give much ground for hope of economic reform...

...and the "favored many" (old people, the blind, homeowners, veterans) are served by political calculation...

...According to Packard, there are "five forces undermining our privacy": (1) population increase and urbanization, (2) the cold war, (3) the increase in leisure, growth of the mass media, and increased corporate obsessions with secrecy, which are said to be due to affluence, (4) the proliferation of businesses pursuing "investigation" for profit and often owned by former government agents, (5) technological advances in spying equipment...

...It all sounds like the Fabian Society in its moments of statist enthusiasms, but reveals little of that group's hostility to preordained private economic pow er...

...The elites themselves are already in favor of many of these policies...

...It's the argument that's covert, however, and not the facts...

...Both of these attacks are often accompanied by a rather unconvincing search for supporting statements of value: administrative reforms are recommended, as a rule, in "social" terms, for their efficiency, while publicity solutions are loosely tied to "personal" qualities of good citizenship, understanding, or even, in the case of Vance Packard, good parenthood (a child should have his own room, he says, in a tone suggesting that this is suppressed information...

...Nevertheless, May has performed a valuable service in assembling accurate in formation about the most significant of welfare state services, and in his story of the Newburgh affair has presented a timely reminder of the cruelty of purportedly conservative movements...

...and "there are dozens of other statutes which seem clearly fashioned for a lone taxpayer known only to himself, his attorney (or lobbyist) and the lawmaker who favored him by sponsoring his made-to-order provision...

...Nevertheless, effective muckraking is more needed than ever...

...If much of politics is as abstract as all that, then the combination of a change in imagery with adjustments in the administrative structure is all that can be expected and modest proposals are the substance of protest...

...Yet it is worth noticing that many of the characteristics of the new social criticism seem to be based upon a series of tacit assumptions regarding the relation of journalism to politics...

...It's hard to suppose that it escaped Stern that his exposure of the tax law's irrationality reveals as well the steel web of corporate power...

...he hurls tough-wise maxims ("Man is the bloodiest of the beasts...

...His claim that the IRS ought to have more agents is disagreeably typical of his viewpoint, and his insistence on equating tax exemptions of varying effects and motives leads him to suspect even the most innocuous of special privileges, such as the one for elderly people...

...he really wants the Treasury to accumulate the largest possible sums in the most consistent possible way...

...The latter include the confident device of the generationskipping trust, whereby a benefactor of great wealth might bestow the income from a $3 million trust on his children and grandchildren...

...These amount, first, to applying diplomatic pressure abroad (in order to lower foreign interest rates, for example), and, secondly, to stimulating the domestic growth rate (by demand-creating measures...

...The tape transcripts are good enough to suggest that interview-stud ies of North Americans would be as interesting as Oscar Lewis's books about Mexicans...

...two books about the military are more precisely topical...

...These proposals, disappointing when compared with the force of their author's attack on present economic policies, have the additional, and usual, demerit of seeming incapable of achievement by present political means...

...It's no small accomplishment that Coffin uses the last phrase for genuinely effective polemical purposes by expanding on his basic definition of it as "a crew" of "military contractors, generals, public-relations scalawags...

...The best sections are those which describe credit checks, lie-detector interrogations, and corporate spying on job applicants...

...Nossiter's remedial proposals center on a system of indicative planning, akin to that which operates in France...

...The flavor of Reuss's many proposals is usefully represented by his discussion of improved monetary mechanisms...

...The worst are those on bureaucratic harassment, police brutality, and "mind manipulation," in all of which Packard either fails to give pertinent examples of the relevant abuses or confuses pointless cruelties, such as the legal punishment of homosexuals, with, say, health regulations on the keeping of goats in New York City...

...His covert argument, however, is that the tax laws operate in dozens of intricate ways to favor business executives, corporations, organized landowners, technical specialists in paper manipulation and, in general, anyone who counts with the legislating coalition of tax experts, Congressmen, and profiteers...