Max Lerner's America
Reagan, Michael
AMERICA AS A CIVILIZATION, by Max Lerner. Simon & Schuster, 1036 pp. $10. This book is disappointingly bland and inconclusive, an exhaustive balance sheet of American assets and...
...This may be true for many Americans...
...For now he finds not a contrast, but "property rights" and "human rights" as "complementary aspects" of democracy...
...This, I think, is the case, and the malady can be identified as part mellowness— a willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to the brighter side of the picture in each section of his book...
...Which page of Lerner d'ya read...
...As in financial balance sheets, some mysterious alchemy equalizes the two sides...
...To this pragmatic strain that gets things done, he then attributes America's success in avoiding the enthronement of fanaticism in national power, or "subscribing to any 'party-line' truth...
...instead, our way is a "grappling with whatever needs to be done—and doing it...
...Does money alone talk in America...
...as part schizophrenia—an inability to make consistent judgments and a disposition to be equally well persuaded in turn by the pros and the cons of the economy, the political system or the state of the arts...
...Sucx INCONSISTENCIES are partly explainable as varying emphases in varying contexts—and a work of 1000 pages is bound to have many contexts...
...Speaking of the alliance of liberal thought with pragmatism, he says: the strength gained by the alliance enabled liberalism to focus on concrete situations for reform...
...The weakness of analysis evident here is plainly attributable to Lerner's apparent acceptance (in most of the book) of the pragmatic pitch: that Americans do not bother with doctrinal commitment...
...While Max Lerner is as impressed today by America's achievements as he was a few years ago by its failures, he has at least not joined the celebrants who see all problems solved, all tensions removed, all the world America's oyster...
...The most disturbing of these results is that Lerner's America turns out to be a surprisingly middle-class America...
...Roosevelt's famed "one-third of a nation" had by 1948 been reduced to onefourth, he also reports...
...What is most troublesome is that the author seems to be taken in by his own rhetoric, with unfortunate results upon his analysis...
...Were Lerner less intent upon lively phrases he might have contradicted himself, and confused us, less...
...But need the criteria of planning be imposed by an elite rather than drawn from the popular needs...
...Surely Lerner himself does not believe that for those 9,400,000 families with incomes under $2,000 the problem of scarcity has "practically ceased to exist...
...This faith is most strongly manifest...
...ed in his discussion of economic stability...
...The latter suggestion, in the absence of evidence for either, seems at least plausible...
...has practically ceased to exist for Americans," citing as proof the decreasing number of workers involved with production rather than services...
...The details of poverty, the high incidence of crime, drug addiction and mental illness, the pervasiveness of acquisitive criteria—all these and more are recognized, even if too much explained away...
...Now I WILL myself display the character of a split pea by expressing a limited admiration for this book and its author...
...But partly, too, they seem attributable to an aspect of both Lerner's thought and style: flamboyant journalistic generalization...
...they have only needs and "wants"—and these are not coin of the realm...
...And how can labor be both "the strongest political group in the nation" (1) while "still a political outsider...
...Whereas in 1938 the capitalist-democratic split was described in class terms, in 1957, it is "less a class conflict than a split within every American...
...ism is most vulnerable on the test of stability, he cites a recent "upsurge of conviction that the cycle had to a large extent been mastered and need never again operate drastically...
...Lerner doesn't say...
...ALL OF THESE are particular faults, and in a book so vast in scope any reviewer is bound to find points that disturb him...
...But confusion is compounded, for he immediately backs away from this by denying that the decisions of the millions are really free—as they must be if they are to be better than the decisions of a few—when the little fish of our economy are so dependent upon the power of the big...
...Those of the middle class who have enough goods turn to services...
...I wonder: is this so, or is it just that Lerner's theoretical clarity on the property-democracy issue has diminished...
...Small wonder that Lerner, 1958, is much less clear and incisive a critic than Lerner, 1938...
...So living standards have improved all through the class system—but the bottom layer got practically none of the increase in income...
...But then he says that from 1948 to 1954 the number of families with income under $2,000 dropped only from 9,600,000 to 9,400,000, and this at "a time when the rise in income and living standards at the upper half of the national scale was steady and substantial...
...but made it also vulner able to the changes and chances of history, squeezing it dry of definite goals and standards...
...But those who still need goods have not the money to create "demand...
...And if that is the way the political system now operates, then the indictment should be of the given system, not of the concept of democratic planning...
...Mainly because the daily newspaper—with all its bias—offers the American few patterns of meaning...
...One more specific comment should be made...
...Yet "even when they do triumph, it is only after they have been measured and defended against the money values...
...i.e., that which may hold for the middleclass is much too easily attributed to the whole society...
...Lerner's interpretations may be too rosy, but his descriptions often succeed in getting across the quality of excitement in American life which even the dissenting critic is glad to share...
...At one point he mentions that criticism of the extremes of wealth and poverty "has recently grown faint er because of the overwhelming evidence of American living standards...
...Surprising, because Lerner's earlier books had the intellectual strength of a coherent position...
...He ignores what Leon Keyserling has recently pointed out: that the Council is accepted in the current Administration only as a forecasting agency, not as a planning group...
...Lerner still sees the basic defects of the American system: that in its abundance of means and techniques it "thrusts into the background the 'why' of the philosophers" and fails to ask the crucial question the Greeks asked: "To what end...
...Simon & Schuster, 1036 pp...
...But instead of responding with a program of democratic action to meet collectively the needs of the majority, he now sees a planned economy as a system of "external criteria imposed by political leaders and power elites," and argues, with what almost seems naivete, that "America has wisely kept away from fusing its economic and political leadership...
...So now the oligarchs have become an essential part of the democratic idea...
...Lerner writes, for example, that "the problem of scarcity...
...In themselves they might not detract greatly from the book's value—unless they were symptomatic or expressive of a deeper malady...
...Instead, he oscillates between conflicting judgments...
...his assertion is merely an act of faith...
...because they have effective economic demand, the economy responds by a shift of labor to service industries...
...And he argued that there was a deep clash of values between capitalism and democracy...
...One wonders how Lerner—the colummist of the New York Post—has learned that this is the reason, rather than, say, the less charitable interpretation that the reader seeks capsulization of the news and an easy source of pseudosatisfaction regarding the arts and entertainment...
...Why this doctrine of no-doctrine leads to analytic and prescriptive weakness is adequately explained by the author himself in a later passage...
...But even as Lerner seems to agree with the "upsurge of conviction" about the economy, he also says that "Americans are far still from solving the basic problem of boom and bust...
...For the fine phrase often lacks concrete meaning: what is the meaning of the statement that organized workers are "the core of the American experience...
...These have improved all through the class system as productivity has increased and the trade unions have been able to claim a share of it for their members" [italics mine...
...Finally he mentions Dewey Anderson's estimate that from 1935 to 1948 only 4 per cent of the increase in national income went to the lowest fifth of the population while "more than 36 per cent went to the top fifth...
...Although he stresses the findings of social science, Lerner has few inhibitions when it comes to casual explanation of American behavior...
...Such consistency as the book has lies in hopeful pieties rather than in hard-minded judgments, as witness the way he resolves this dichotomy: "That (non-acquisitive values) survive is the final tribute to their hardihood, and when they do survive .. . they have a greater strength than in those cultures where they do not have to measure themselves so searchingly against the domination effect of the business spirit...
...Admitting that American capital...
...When we get down to cases, we see that out of these 25 years the baby boom began after 1940, atomic energy for war in 1945 and for peace not really yet, the automatic factory only during the past ten years in any significant degree, and 1952 had the first TV election...
...but it is also not true of many others...
...This book is disappointingly bland and inconclusive, an exhaustive balance sheet of American assets and liabilities...
...A radical indictment of American life can find solid foundation in Lerner's descriptions, and even in parts of his analysis, of America's shortcomings...
...and, underlying both, a surprising absence of any criteria for critical evaluation...
...Today, however, he gives split decisions on these questions...
...In It is Later Than You Think (1938), for example, Lerner gave cogent diagnosis and prognostication for American society, stressing the need for democratic collective 284 action...
...He asserts that in the absence of planning or of an aristocracy to set social goals, these decisions are left to the millions...
...that if it were ever to seek the better as against the merely bigger, "an acquisitive society has few ways of measuring it...
...The same problem of finding out what Lerner really thinks is apparent in his discussion of income distribution...
...And then he leaves the subject...
...Those who suggest that boom and bust are inherent in the system are disposed of as "die-hard critics" and the Council of Economic Advisers' reports are mentioned as a form of "corrective and preventive planning" accepted by both Republican and Democratic administrations...
...And this is just the effect that Lerner's movement from a doctrine of democratic collectivism to a faith in pragmatic improvements has had on America As a Civilization...
...Why do Americans buy "news magazines...
...No, says Lerner: "other values than the acquisitive find a place in American life, and often they triumph...
...Which, one wonders, is his considered judgment...
...The period 1933-1957 is characterized as one of sprouting babies and autos, of atomic energy for war and peace, of the automatic factory, of the new middle classes, of crowded universities, of TV elections, of stockmarket boom and high taxes and skyrocketing incomes which everyone lived beyond...
...unlike the financial statement, Lerner gives us no judgment of the society's "net worth...
...But on what basis can we say that the struggle will leave the "victor" stronger, rather than limp and exhausted...
Vol. 5 • July 1958 • No. 3
