Wendell Willkie: Stigma Remover f?r Wall Street's Billion Dollar Over-Capitalizecl Public Utilities
ALTMAN, IRVING B.
Wendell Willkie: Stigma Remover f?r Wall Street's Billion Dollar Over-Capitalizecl Public Utilities By IRVING B. ALTMAN Editor of. Dynamic America WENDELL WILLKIE, opposing Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...t^feyBeppbt?can convention...
...They could now sip a cocktail while discussing—in the dark secrecy of a Hollywood salon, to be sure—the "dialectical materialist approach to literature...
...Frank points out the attitude of our "liberal" and "radical" intellectuals toward the Communist Party and the...
...And they did...
...There was a time "public relations" ?dst meant publicity work, but in recent years the professions have become dignified, so now we have "morticians," "beauticians," "realtors" and "public relations counsel," etc...
...One day I read in a: Russian literary magazine that Leopold Averbach, the literary boss of Soviet Russia, was in disgrace and on his way out...
...never pointed in his books (some of them written long before'the...
...In Stalin's parlance, this was a danger signal...
...2-3, 1932) had some more to say about my "greatness" as a critic...
...Henceforth it was to be "Socialist Realism" and "Red Romanticism" instead of "proletarian" and "revolutionary" J^erature...
...While trained in the legal profession, Willkie found that his talents would prove most productive in an entirely different field— ¦that of public relations...
...a tangled brush and parched earth will yield ta teeming, bustling cities...
...Mark the language...
...H. L. Mencken is undoubted^ right when he...
...In America this kaleidoscope of superficiality has been extreme...
...She could read a little English but had not the slightest conception of American life, tradition or literature...
...Willkie's headquarters are found in 10,000 brokerage offices throughout the country...
...Moreover, he...
...At all general and panel sessions, the chair barred motions from the floor...
...John Dos Passes painted the hollowness and wastefulness of pre-depression American life (particularly in his U.S.A...
...Likewise, the solution of the unemployment problem which, according to Browder a year ago, Te^Xj support of the Administration, now requires removal o* the President who recently criticized Moscow for *¦* ^rst time...
...Upton Sinclair's status was debated for several months and then, to the consternation of the literary comrades, the line on literature has...
...Needless to point out, Willkie has had no governmental experience at all...
...Deeply moved by the depression and the suffering it had caused...
...The insufficient politization of the work of New Masses," wrote A. Elistratova in her analysis of the magazine, "the insufficient impregnation of the wh9le activity of the journal with the spirit of party militancy, leaves an impress on the whole of its literary artistic production...
...the second is extensive fear that Congress may undermine democracy by adopting wtl-alien and repressive bills now before it...
...Practically all the twenty-two systems were overcapitalized, but only one exceeded Commonwealth and Southern...
...Altman edits the crusading financial magazine...
...A new technique had <o be developed to win friends and influence people.^ The American proplei;feniemberihgth...
...Morgan and Co...
...William D Pelley, whose New Liberation was largely an outlet for Nazi propaganda supplied from Erfurt by Col...
...The sponsors included numerous old League for Peace and Democracy officials and Communist Party members...
...Browder promised thai'11 wartime Communists would help suppress dissidents «• "Fascist traitors," but now he wants full latitude Jf them...
...CurleyLocks AS genial as the late Will Rogers, as homey) as Martha Skellets' "1000 Ways to Piense a Husband'' (by cooking), as studiedly -careless about attire as a small studio scenario writer, as fall of the American roots as the banks of the Wabash— that's Wendell Willkie...
...There arose a type known as "fellow-traveler...
...These are the people who put Willkie over at...
...For, said Comrade A. Elistratova, "we must warn our American comrades right now of the dangers connected with a non-critical attitude towards the system of Plekhanov's ideology as a whole, from which Dennen's article suffers...
...Glibly, in the best pent-house fashion, they began to speak about "Marxist" literature and write nonsense about workers forgetting (or never knowing) that a true social literature is one, as Engels said, where the proletarian bias flows from the situation and the action itself without being explicitly formulated...
...These, however, unable to follow the turns and twists of the Stalinist Party "line" emanating from Moscow, have long since placed a ten-foot intellectual pole between themselves and their Stalinist contemporaries...
...In an effort to catch readers now shying away from the Communist New Masses, a new fellow-travelers weekly, mi v wwvr Friday, has been launched by Cameron Mackenzie, i Stalin whip in the Newspaper Guild, Ruth McKemwy, New Masses editor, and Dan Gilmorc...
...These are the people who today are sporting Willkie buttons...
...The bloody war now raging in Europe has once more frightened our "liberal" intelligentsia...
...In the history of American literature and social thought, however, they will be remembered as the "Irresponsables," as Archibald Mac-Leish so aptly characterized them, who were responsible for the chaos and confusion in our present-day social, moral and intellectual life...
...convinced that the economic order of the country had been broken beyond repair, and moved by sympathy and compassion for the victims of the economic crisis, many American intellectuals set out to create a literature that would have a social function, that would illuminate the social scene and bring its darkest places clearly into view...
...The side of Mr...
...Thus Erskine Caldwell gave us his brutally-realistic study of a poverty-stricken and depraved Southern tenant family...
...adopting a subservience to 'political leaders and a servile view of art and literature as essentially a tool of social agitation or reporting, which stultifies the whole autonomy of the intellectual's mission...
...This writer has known investors who were more concerned about dividends on their shares amounting to no more than $10 or $12 a year than they were about excess charges for electricity paid by them amounting to two or three times the dividends...
...One lady of our acquaintance, the holder of possibly a hundred shares of public utility stock, paid for telegrams of her chauffeur and maid...
...More often than not he was neither an intellectual nor a writer but a "literary diplomat" like Alexander Trachtenberg, the head of the International Publishers, whose function it was to entice the ambitious and unsuspecting intellectual into the Stalinist sphere of influence...
...The Communists hope, by playing up to these concern» of liberal, labor and peace groups, to recoup the to***1 they suffered from the signing of the pact with Hitler...
...but that's how-it's done...
...Reed Club...
...A" FEW WEEKS before his nomination, Willkie was-elected a director of the Morgan-Baker First National Bank of New York...
...It hopes to go to town in a big way, and has already helped make an impressin on the public mind...
...T. L. Harris, quondam commissar of the peace and democracy boys, and lsobei Walker Soule, an old peace and democracy girl...
...The China Aid Council of the American League for Peace and Democracy is now the Council, tout court, » change which slightly anticipated the Stalin-Hitler pact...
...The Ethical Culture Society, early a warm supporter, has cooled off...
...They are traceable," she said, "to one underlying defect, i.e., the insufficient politization of the whole work of the New Masses, to the journal's lack of a sufficiently militant party line, in the Leninist sense of the term...
...The German-American Bund, working through Wilhelm Kunze since Fritt Kuhn went to Sing-Sing for theft, prefers the sloeW "Neutrality and Civil Liberties" for its new front set-op...
...I_|?RE I might as well mention that it was I who brought .,Htbe glad (or sad) tidings to my eol.Ieagues of the John...
...But this only goes to prove that Willkie, as in the case of most "liberal" business men who decry monopoly and argue for the free, competitive-enterprise system, never practice what they preach...
...Any person who takes seriously the talk from Willkie sources that his campaign-for the Republican nomination sprung from the casual suggestion of Hugh Johnson making that recommendation, and that the entire campaign was carried on by a bunch of amateurs still wet behind the ears, is indeed a naive person...
...Yet so deep was the depravity of our "liberal" and "radical" intellectuals who swallowed uncritically the Stalinist "line"—and these, unfortunately, constituted until recently a great majority of our writers, artists and teachers _that even this intellectual moron could dictate to them at her will her ideas on literature, and they accepted it as the wisdom of the ages simply because it originated in the Mecca of Stalinism...
...regard'public utility men with affection'and esteem...
...He did not create the over-capitalization, but he has successfully supported it...
...The income of these future Columbia Basin farmers, and the townspeople in the cities springing up in the wake of this see agricultural empire in the Keith-west, will create another substantial buying market for the manufactured goods and processed foods of industrial centers ia the East and elsewhere...
...The American Committee for the Defense of the Foreign Born has also been completely revamped, with 28 out of the 36gold officers and directors gone...
...Recently Stalinist fellow-traveler Mary Van Kleek argued that Communist leader Elisabeth Gurley Flynn should not be expelled from the Board of the American Civil Liberties Union because of her totalitarian beliefs, but that a representativa of the Nazis should be elected to sit beside her...
...Several weeks later, however, when the "line" came down officially from Moscow, I was proclaimed as one of the "great" Marxist critics in America...
...area on the ground that the great federally-owned project was in competition with private business...
...For other forces, alien both to literature and to American tradition, worked hard to capitalize upon the literary revolt of our intellectuals and direct it into their own channels...
...Although Hitler-Mussolini plans for setting up new fronts lag behind agents of Stalin's, this pair is not passive...
...So selling Willkie to the politicians was no easy ?j?b...
...Communists to abandon their pseudo-revolutionary line and pay lip-service to the New Deal and Popular Frontism, "Proletarian Literature" jreceived new and vocal adherents ;f rom unexpected quarters...
...This, of course, is not accidental: it is entirely due to the insufficient politization of the whole work of the New Masses...
...The fir** is increasingly widespread concern over the persistence of mass unemployment...
...The Cynics of yesterday, bored with Hollywood and their pent-houses, decided to become r-revolutionists...
...literature which was begun at the 'Kharkov-.Congress...
...A. Yuorela, advocate of the StalhvKuuiincTi "government of Finland" of brief and notorious duration...
...tragic years of frenzied finance, are...
...None of these really concerns the totalitarians, who are merely instruments of the foreig policy of their home governments...
...Though he is in ,no...
...Among these, of course, there was also many honest, sincere and able practitioners o? the literary craft...
...No Socialists, Trotskyites or anti-Stalin unionists or liberals were invited...
...This victory'by the •utility holding company made of' Willkie a hero, and from then dfflhV was Wall Street's white hope...
...But each one was a veritable "confession" before a purge...
...The new boss brought also with him new literary, formulas...
...one of its leaders, Algernon Black, has quit the continuations set-up...
...Several years later it did fall on Freeman's head...
...Thus civil liberties could be preserved for all...
...The substitution of new fronts for old will prove a boon to the open enemies as well as the false friend* of the most irreproachable slogans...
...dividend 'Cheeks...
...Retreat from Moscow WELTSCHMERZ, soul-searching, *" breast-beating, confusion, these have filled the air in the particular cocktail party milieus inhabited by that genus knows as Intellectualitus Stalinismus...
...More than ninety per cent of the American writers presented no difficulty to these "literary" comrades, for they were simply relegated to the "capitalist" camp without even the benefit of the label "revolutionary...
...And, of course, as/ a member of the Century,- University, Recess, Lawyers, and Blind Brook clubs, he meets the right people socially...
...I hardly escaped, with, my life...
...a young Stalini* fellow-traveler reputedly playing "angel...
...trilogy...
...Every device employed by modern business was utilized to put Willkie over...
...They operated with catch-phrases and slogans—"Literature as a Class Weapon," the "Dialectical Approach to Literature," etc.—which were supplied to them by the Stalinist literary cliques that were dominant at the moment in Soviet Russia, but which had little to do with literature...
...The kw friendship builders began life with a meeting glorifying: Stalin's conquest of Finland...
...the third i» grass-roots opposition to foreign war and a conviction that eternal vigilance is the price of peace...
...Willkie will have the almost solid support of business, investors, and the press...
...The fact that the fascists sing more or less the 'a** tune, is leading all the totalitarian boys into interesting relations with each other, quite in line with the Moscow-Berlin pact...
...or "nuisance value," •tftf th?_f?ir value-of the'Tennessee property...
...The limited discussion was vague and chaotic, dominated by the platform lecturers who took on color chiefly when they became factionally pro-St?linist...
...tibt prone...
...One of his first and most enthusiastic backers was Thomas W." Lamont, of J.,P...
...In his recent unsuccessful Congressional campaig^ Browder's platform was "jobs, peace, civil liberties, desiderata for which he gives not a hoot...
...Bolshevik Revolution) "the Bolshevik way out...
...Undoubtedly, in Willkie's mind the furtherance of this cause and the preservation of American democracy are one and the same' thing...
...This figure repre-•sents'an over-payment of about 825,000,000...
...Bdt the job wasdbne, and now that the nomination is won, the'-next step'is t? sefl Willkie to the American people...
...Father Coughlin's ¦Christian Front disciples are contemplating liquidation...
...Waldo Frank, is "to keep the values ^he organic sense of life and man's individual W^p?j^S?taTe in it/' -were aghast...
...The War, the amoral Realpolitik of Stalin, the ruthless march of Hitler has led to a new paralysis of confusion, doubt, and retreat to inaction and the Ivory tower...
...Yesterday they were rugged individualists...
...That Willkie was well connected can be seen from the "following' directorship connections: Consumers Power Co., Ohio "Edison, Co...
...During the presidential campaign they permitted their artists to depict pictori?lly for some childish reason the fight between the Republican and Democratic parties as a-contest between an elephant and a donkey instead of portraying it as a struggle between two bloodthirsty capitalists...
...The latter even topped Associated Gas and Electric, whose flagrant over-capitalization has been a matter of nauseous notoriety...
...Willine was not the politicians' candidate...
...Many of them have "jumped off the Stalinist train" and are running for cover...
...John Bauer, the rioted utility expert, writing in Dynamic America, states: "Mr...
...The literary magazines are once more full with their recriminations, breast-beatings and calls to repentance...
...The speakers at the panel on minority groups were fellow-traveler Max Yergan of the Conference, who succeeded recently to the presidency of the National Negro Congress when Pullman porter union leader A. Philips Randolph quit because the Congress took a Communist line, and Communist Central Committee member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn...
...In doing so he has helped to obfuscate the general situation in the country, and especially to obstruct the advancement of the great projects which were undertaken as a matter of national policy...
...alliance...
...The shallow little souls who were literary "rebels" in their youth, breaking glasses in' their surrealist cafes, sneering at Socialism and Socialists, and who became members of the "misunderstood" "Lost Generation" in their middle age, have suddenly discovered in ?their declining years that by embracing the creed of Stalinism, one can have the romance of the revolution without_any of its responsibilities...
...Recently they even secured front page publicity for Wendell because he bought a book to take with him on vacation—just like real folks do...
...yhe...
...Until fte pert-he favored a holy war against the Berlin-Borne-Toky* Axis...
...The waters of the new iresenvoir will also be used to generate tn abundant supply of low-cost hydro-electric power to light farm and city homes and run factories...
...debata as.to , the difference between "proletarian" and l'?revolutipn^ry...
...changed in Moscow...
...the reader will remember that $300 per customer is considered a fair capitalization: American Power and Light Co.-$887 per customer Commonwealth and Southern-- 815 " Electric Power and Light-?_ 796 " - Niagara Hudson Power _- 783 " Southern California Edison ' -: "—— 728 " Associated Gas and Electric- 687 JL National Power and Light__;--— 663 ¦* Pacific Gas and Electric- 634 " Stone and Webster'-.-— 625 " New England Power Association' ?—?J 614 " " Standard Power and Light-- 609 " American Gas and Electric ;-,- 608 " " "Mr...
...Among those who jumped on the Willkie-bandwagon were two bright young men...
...They had to begin their "confessions" at once...
...A new literary boss by the name of Kirpotin was to take poor Averbach's place...
...It is not without symbolic interest, at the very least that among the members of the continuations committee of the Inalienable Rights conference are Leonard Cevello, who formerly promoted Italian fascist denunciations of democracy, and one Bardi, formerly a Fascist teacher under the name of Bascetta...
...pleting the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia river...
...Perhaps the best characterization of these pent-house "rebels" was given by Waldo Frank, who was a leader among them and who paid as a result the full price, both intellectually and morally...
...This new mood was most widespread in New York, particularly among the young, ambitious and jobless intellectuals who embraced the creed of Communism because they saw in it an end of their disillusionment Mr...
...But, unfortunately, the average "investor" does not realize that he has more at stake in protecting his interests as a consumer than as investor...
...Those intellectuals who accepted the "line" of the American Communist Party, he says, "for the most part did so blindly, scrutinizing neither the logic nor the basic premises of Marx...
...Oh, yes, the signatures are authentic...
...upon my visit to Russia, discovered to be a half-baked politician and intellectual fraud...
...SINCE'" I have indulged in this bit of reminiscences in order to shed additional light on the .intellectual integrity of the Dorothy Parkers, Donald Ogden Stewarts, Leane Zug-smithsV Malcolm Cowleys and the rest of the Stalinist "Kter?ry" gentry, shall not describe the number of letters and telegrams admitting the "mistakes" of the editors of the New Masses that were dispatched to the bosses in Moscow...
...Willkie which is hidden by those curly locks is revealed here by Irving B. Altman, 1940 prototype of the muckrakers who exposed the frenzied finance of the century's lush and early days...
...Freshened with Mrs...
...Henry Hart of the New Masses...
...On June 7 the Conference was instrumental, along with like bodies of other regions, in floating the Conference on Constitutional Liberties in America...
...40,00| homeless farmers and their fcsy ilies will have a new Uvefchood...
...Taft, Dewey and Vandenberg would have been just "push-overs" for F.D.R...
...Electric power is based upon natural monopoly, and one need not be a Socialist to realize that in the field of natural monopoly the public interest is best served by public ownership...
...Revolutionary Writers" and transe sported to the United States by such "mental giants" as Michael Gold, A. B. Magil and Joshua Kunitz, names now happily forgotten -(I am mentioning them merely for the record), went on at the New York John Reed Club for more than a.year...
...As it was, the Stalinist axe was about to fall on their literary heads...
...Upton Sinclair, however, who in those days had a great deal of integrity and has as yet refused to tow the Party "line," presented a real problem...
...The professional politicians un-dt»btedfy...
...Here has also been launched a new magazine called F3m...
...According to analysis based upon figures reported by the Federal Power Commission for the year 1933, the gross book values of the Commonwealth and Southern's electric properties amounted to about $815 per customer...
...But it is not only because they accepted uncritically the "blah" of the times that our "liberal" and "radical" intellectuals contributed so little of significance to our life and literature...
...For the moment and for the next year or so, the totalitarian call, Stalinist and Nazi, is for "jobs, peace, civil liberties...
...to the extent that the government paid him $78,600,000 ? for the Conjmonwealth and Southern properties in the T.V.A...
...An estimated half-million population, town and country, are expected to settle because of these new economic opportunities...
...THE Stalinists are not the only totalitarians laborinf to repair the havoc wrought by the pact...
...The search for values, for standards, are . part of the intellectual heritage of all of us...
...The tender knows how the story goes: Government (is the largest business in the country and a business man, not politician, should ran it...
...today, aware that the United States will not.lJ'T Berlin or Moscow, Browder damns the war as imperial seeks to immobilize the United States for Stalin'a benefit...
...THIS does not exhaust the roster of new fronts...
...And where he could not succeed in thwarting the efforts of government, he interfered with the T.V.A...
...A BOUT a year later, upon my visit to Moscow, I met this ^* Elistratova, who was dictating with so much confidence and arrogance the literary "line to the New Masses, a magazine that was then publishing in its pages the works of such men as Theodore Dresier, Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson and a host of other American writers...
...ij "The history of the overwhelming mass of intellectuals in our time," he writes, "is a shifting from one fragmentary vision,-one fragmentary doctrine, to the next...
...The workers became to them an object of love, adoration, adulation, but more often a subject of intellectual speculation...
...He is a man of ability, courage and has plenty of masculine "oomph"—the latter a consideration with our eighty million movie-goers...
...In other words, the whole'- kaboooUe of Roosevelt haters will rally' to the support of Wendell Willkie...
...The following figures from the Federal Power report will give an adequate picture of over-capitalization in the utilities' field...
...This section, tracing some of the history of the yielding of the critical faculties of the Communist critics to the mechanical whip-snapping in Moscow, is the conclusion of the first article of a series by Mr...
...One way or another, the new fronts mean now headache* for labor, liberal and peace torees, — -_• ^^?aM??MsMI Present-Day Intellectual's Chaos Product oj Uncritical Adherence to Stalinism By LEON DENNEN IREMEMBER vividly the humorous spectacle of distinguished American practitioners of the literary craft heatedly debating the difference between "proletarian" and ."revolutionary" literature, two formulas coined by a Soviet .'citizen named Leopold Averbach whom I. later...
...His first discussion last week laid the ground for the present—disintegration and shallowness in those intellectuals' approach...
...Employers pay for the telegrams of employees...
...a submersion in eddies, a being carried away by...
...Willkie is an honorable ** man...
...In the light of his actual experience and activities, either as a corporation lawyer or as president of Commonwealth and Southern, Willkie is a poor bet as a progressive leader for the United States at this time...
...IN erecting its new fronts, the Stalinists play on three major sentiments of the man in the street...
...James T. Farrell, the degeneration of the lower middle-class Irish...
...But the factis, so far as can be determined from public records, Willkie is no more a business man than your Aunt Susie...
...But many of the "honest left" have had to face the social ostracism, the scorn, as well as the hypocritical literary and intellectual criticism, of those critics whose loyalties—and in many cases whose livelihoods!—were owed to Moscow...
...Isserman, an old International Labor Defense agent, protested against political persecution by glorifying the sole "labor martyr" named in a set speech —Earl Browder, Communist boss and convicted user of fraudulent passports...
...T IERE...
...The first, Oren Root, Jr., a member of the ,prbminent J. P. Morgan law firm, Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Gardiner and Reed, ran a series of small newspaper ads to Taise money for the pre-nomination campaign...
...Similarly with civil liberties: when Stalin looked for**" to a U.S-A.-U.S.S.R...
...Willkie's principal job as president of the Commonwealth and Southern," continues Dr...
...Of course, the fact that Davenport's father is a vice-president of — m Bethlehem Steel couldn't possibly have influenced the young editor to join up in the Willkie campaign—or could it...
...I was all but read out tfcafeg- John Reed Club—the predecessor of the present 5S^BBHbFAmerican...
...j For Miss Dorothy Parker and' her coterie to become Stalinist "revolutionists" was like changing a pair of gloves...
...Had similar charges been made against Joseph Freeman and Michael Gold in Moscow, their fate would have been-sealed...
...JUDGED by present-day standards, Mr...
...These are the concrete fisiona seen by the planners in charge of the government's Columbia Basis Reclamation project now com...
...And there is no gainsaying the fact that in choosing Willkie, the Republican Party made its best possible choice...
...He has been replaced by a number of reliable fellow-travelers...
...As successor to the Friends of the Soviet Unios, the Communists have organized their American Committee for Friendship with the Soviet Union...
...and Dewey to Wiflkae, but the dough-boysvjwanted "she public utility man, so Willkitgot the nomination...
...Joseph Freeman and Michael Gold were literally besides themselves...
...Herman Reissig, Roger Baldwin and William Warder Norton...
...The cause of the Republican Party this year, as every other year, is the promotion of the interests of big business and finance...
...Dennen on the impasse before us...
...says that the "writers of the Thirties have been enslaved by the Bushwah of the pinks" and that "no good art can come from men who believe in the blah of their times...
...In promoting the Willkie campaign for the Republican gaomination, big business used typically big business methods., The "spontaneous" movement for Willkie is just so much nonsense...
...But old touzle-kead is not all-white sheep, Hoosier Willkie is one of the-power-trusts most glamorous publicity men...
...Once again they are in search of "new" values...
...current winds of fancy...
...as one of the shrewdist battery of- publicity men in the nation is painting him...
...Willkie justifies his activity against the government in the T.V.A...
...He Is' more big business than Taft, Vandenberg and Dewey put together...
...James Roosevelt's name as Honorarv Chairman, it still distributes funds through an old Chinese committee set up by Moscow agent Agnes Smedley...
...Ulrich F-leischhauer, has announced the liquidation of his Silvr Shirt Legion...
...area...
...In other words, to the trained eye and ear, the whole Willkie publicity campaign stank no less than his campaign against the T.V.A...
...Yet, according to the dictum laid down by Averbach at Kharkov, he was not a "proletarian" writer since he "merely criticized capitalist society but was himself a slave of its ideology...
...Without apologies, the long-announced Labor Panel chairman gave his gavel to Gardner Jackson, who sounded off a private beef against critics of well-meant forgery, including his purveying of the phony "Dies-Pelley correspondence...
...The same methods used by the utilities in the attack upon the Utility Holding Act of 1935 were employed to advance the cause of Willkie...
...Its sponsors include Anna Louise Strong, professional Moscow prop*-gandist...
...I ¦ 'if ^hastened to share my discovery with my literary com-gges- JFhe distinguished American intellectuals whose func-jPgyffiqjg?g to Mr...
...Leon Dennen has been tracing that story...
...Delegates chiefly listened to set speeches...
...This compares with about $560 per customer, for the twenty-two largest holding company systems in the country, and with a maximum of about $300- per customer that would be reasonably justified on the grounds of prudent investment...
...She was a big, buxm girl with red cheeks—all of twenty years old...
...Leon Dennen's article on Plekhanov and the Marxian Approach to Art," wrote the same lady, ". . . has great value, and as far as we know, it constitutes the first attempt made in America to utilize and assimilate Plekhanov's legacy in the field of literary criticism...
...The editors of the New Masses, she complained to me, were incorrigible...
...As' a dramatic instance Mr...
...Sinclair could not be called, by any stretch of the imagination, a "capitalist" writer...
...But the fact remains that the Republican candidate has given much of his 48 years to the service of corporations—and, particularly, corporations who operate in a field of "public service" where there is the least justification for private enterprise...
...Paul Castorina's American Union of Fascists has also been scrapped...
...It is for the voters to decide how this experience aptly qualifies him for the Presidency of the United States...
...The original backers of Willkie were clever enough to know that Willkie, as the president of a billion-dollar utility holding company and who as recently as two years ago was a registered Democrat, could not be sold-to Republican Party bosses in the old traditional way...
...The goo ran thick and sickening sweet...
...I was disgraced, it seems, forever...
...I had hardly reached the top rung of the literary ladder when I was already being "purged...
...One Bailey, an admirer of Hitler, has set up the Citizens' National Committee to Keep Out of War, thus duplicating the Communist attempt to appropriate the name of an established anti-war organization...
...Davenport says that he met his hero at a Fortune ^round-table" meeting and fell in love with him at first sight...
...Leon Dennen's article on Soviet literature," wrote A. Elistratova as a tribute in International Literature (Number 1, 1932), the literary bible of American radical intellectuals, published in Moscow, "should be welcomed as the first attempt of the journal (New Masses) to contribute to the internationalization of the_ creative, experience of Soviet proletarian literature...
...prefe»red Taft...
...The press in its enthusiasm for the utility man went the limit and for awhile it appeared they were going to make the mistake of overdoing the job of building sentiment for their choice...
...On tfie culture fronts puzzlement still prevails, but steps have been taken in the direction of dumping tie wreckage of the Artists Congress into the ArocMu Group, a sympathetic painters' body, and of revival 1st comatose New Theatre League to replace TAC...
...Dynamic America WENDELL WILLKIE, opposing Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Presidency this year, makes the political issue a clear-cut oneJfifefcween the interests of Wall Street and Main Street...
...i Perhaps in retrospect I am somewhat simplifying the process of disintegration that went oil for the last deeade or so among out "liberal" and "radical" intellectuals...
...It is significant in this respect that the New Masses has not dealt with the historic utterances of Comrade Stalin in recent years...
...Both voted with she Stalin caucus...
...Willkie's accomplishments must be Considered particularly in the light of the fact that when he took the presidency, the Commonwealth and Southern system was one of the most water-fogged or over-capitalized/ in the country...
...Small ». rigated farms will grow alfalfa and other forage crops, garden truck and other vegetables, frajti and berries...
...Advertising agencies lent their experts in molding public opinion, and a subservient press did more than its share in building up the now Willkie myth...
...question for the entire revolutionary literary movement in America in which the sketch is the leading genre...
...Realizing the Communist domination of the Conference, several organizations which had been represented there broke loose, among them the League for Industrial Democracy, the Workers Defense League, the Women's Trade Union League, and several churches...
...today they proclaimed the death of the individual and the glory of the collective)—Stalinist Man...
...J This largest man-made body of water in the world, its 161 mile length and 36 mile width* makes it as long as Lake Ontario, will provide*** irrigation supply for 1,200,000 acres of "land...
...Their politics and their misuse o? relief funds cost them control of the Spanish Refugees Relief Campaign Committee headed by Bishop Francis J. McConnell, Rev...
...As though this were not enough praise for my "revolutionary foresight," the following numbers of International Literature (Nos...
...Writers...
...My wrath, however, was somewhat tempered by the fact that the editors Cjf the New Masses received a strong verbal lashing from the same lady...
...It seems that somewhere I ran afoul of Stalin's dictat...
...I i In criticism there were men like?.Edmund Wilson, John Chamberlain, Van Wyck Brooks, who probed earnestly for a way out of the blind alley in which the social and economic life in America found itself as a result of the depression...
...Sale of the energy will help amortize the self-sustaining project whose cost will be repaid in 50 years...
...Wendell Willkie is put forth as a great business man...
...ALMOST a year ago this writer saw the beginnings of one of the shrewdest political campaigns this country has ever seen a?o* 'at the time predicted its success...
...doctrine of Marx as interpreted by it...
...however, there is also a warning against me...
...In addressing the Republican convention after his nomination, Willkie told the assembled delegates that he stood pledged "to the advancement of your cause and for the preservation of American democracy...
...The truth is that the depression of 1929 resulted almost spontaneously in the revival of a literature of social protest in the United States...
...Its capacity of 1,844,-000 kilowatts, resulting from its tremendous generating equipment, is the largest in the world...
...The Stalinists have also reorganized, by means of a "Natural Emergency Confer-ence," their fund-raising work carried on in the name o! Spanish refugees...
...This is his unvarnished record as a business man...
...Bauer, "was thus to represent and defend a system whose capitalization build-up could not be justified...
...His sole experience with government consisted of - opposing the administration's efforts to provide cheap and abundant electric power to millions of homes not enjoying this -advantage...
...project...
...But Willkie talks competition and insists upon monopolistic privilege for himself and his kind...
...But in the opinion of this writer, Main Street will continue to prefer Washington as the national capital rather, than Wall Street The cause of the preservation of American democracy will be best served by a vote for Roosevelt and Wallace...
...he was the spontaneous and popular choice of the people—that is, the people generitly ?found <in brokers' offices who clip coupons and wait fbr...
...Fascists Sit on Governing Boards of CP Fronts As Comintern Revamps American Apparatus By HERBERT SOLOW •tphe meeting of the Greater New York Emergency Con-* ference on Inalienable Rights was hardly democracy run wild...
...In fact,-the average citizen/when he finds'himself in the presence of a utility man, instinctively reaches for his watch and pocketbook...
...I had then already reached my twenty-third birthday...
...But it is on the basis of these slogans that the new totalitarian fronts are being set up and that innocents, whose birthrate Barnum underestimated, are being taken in...
...With a 1940 budget of $5,000 met, nobody knows just how, and a news letter to spread its views, the Conference has actively espoused all current Communist-backed drives for "freedom," and nothing jlse...
...Russell W. Davenport, managing editor for Fortune, America's most elaborate business magazine, quit his job and undertook to coordinate the publicity for Willkie...
...i) * *T*HE majority of the "Proletarian-literature" boys and girls are merely Stalinist hacks,/whose literary function was to follow the zig-zags of the Communist Party line...
...Southern Indiana Gas and Electric Company, Central Illinois Light Co., trustee bf Edison Electric Institute, and presi-"deftt'bf Commonwealth and Southern Corporation...
...Little people, with a few shares invested in utility companies, are lined up by brokers and urged to write letters and send telegrams...
...Grand Coules New Life for a Half-Million A dry arid soil will become J rich moist loam...
...The question of the sketch as a genre of proletarian literature, with which Dennen deals in detail, is a most burning (sic...
...In disgrace, too, were his literary formulas...
...When Earl Browder, upon his return from Moscow, ordered the...
...More than that: All these mistakes and shortcomings, the literary commissar of Moscow complained, were not accidental...
...way responsible for-it,-he'will-also get support from the isolationist elements as well as Nazi, and • Fascist minded Americans...
Vol. 23 • August 1940 • No. 31
