Vargas the Authoritarian
Naft, Stephen
Vargas the Authoritarian By STEPHEN NAFT BRAZIL UNDER VARGAS. By Karl Lotwenstein, New York, 1942. The ??????? Co. 381 pages. $2.75. /" QESPITE the title, which might convey the impression that...
...Nuhn, writing a kind of hit-and-run criticism, simply overlooks that the age of Adams and James was also the "gilded age" of Stedman and Gilder...
...I wonder who put into his head some of the beautiful sentiments he uttered...
...Strange though that neither the Daily Worker nor the NMU press have mentioned his case—even he is one of the inside bcjvs...
...But the burden of the volume is an intensive estimate of the work of Henry James, Henry Adams, and T. S. Eliot—Americans, he remarks, "who started and did not start with their own, or did not know, when they started, what their own was...
...It implies that the sphere of private life of the individual citizen or subject^ is subordinated to the public policies of the state to the point of obliteration...
...After long searching, they found a Hindu who admitted an ability to speak English and agreed to furnish them a guide to the nearest picket lines...
...Why should the trade union students be exclusively Vie objects of a do-good attitnde...
...Representative Cooley stands up to the House and exclaims: "It takes a lot of gall for the administration to ask us "to draft boys still tied to their mothers' apron •trihgs to go out and fight while it rejects the applications of able-bodied men in this House...
...von Buei-ow's prophetic view of air warfare in the Pacific...
...Nor does he seem to understand that an artist writes out of a vision of life in his time, and not from a prescribed set of social or national principles...
...Communism used to be a big bugaboo...
...Some of the chapters are original and sustained essays in literary analysis and argument...
...So they started out behind the banner carrier...
...others are grab-bags of ideas, prejudices, wordplays, and critical tomfoolery...
...Yet what is he after...
...Authoritarian' refers to the form of government, to the type and technique of the policy-forming power...
...a Millay or Benet...
...f Harvard and Labor / THE fact that Harvard does not depend on seniority for its repu-1 tation is suggested by the naming of 14 labor, fellows who will carry on free-and-easy work at Cambridge as'the famous Nieman Fellows in Journalism have been doing...
...chanted beauty of the past...
...A man •f 40 is far past that point...
...The occasional function of this column is to nail these lies as fast as they are manufactured...
...Our experience shows that the older ¦en...
...of all things, arrived carrying the Hammer and Sickle of the Commies...
...By ROBERT TREVOR *|??8 WEEK'S NMU JAB FOLLOWS HARD on exposure and double-dealing by union officials who were too close to die oil companies...
...Abd-el-Krim is a clever leader...
...TTHERE is no denying that Nuhn's argument is in good part sound...
...Only the day before the government, as a gesture to Russia, had legalized the Communist Party in India...
...She is runnihg for Congressman-at-Large on the Communist ticket...
...We are beginning to understand that they are ordinary people like ourselves, who love beauty, who love life—mothers who take pride In their sons...
...300 pages...
...Randolph's Sleeping-Car Porters would function as one more independent union...
...I think it is...
...There is, however, the pessimistic note: "Nobody can foretell what the'hidden totalitarian...
...The essays are collected under the headings of" "The Pattern of Modern War," "The Art of War," "The War Machine...
...In passing the amendment to the draft law, Congress is conforming to tradition and almost' uniform custom...
...Youth, Me Droff and the Vof e IJ0W hot are the thoughts of all of us about sending boys of 18 " and 19 into the firing-line is proved both by the debate in Congress and by the letters which stream in to The New Leader...
...as MacLeish was linked to the Trotskyites...
...One of my brothers entered the Civil War at seventeen, and he was far from being the youngest in the Union armies of those days...
...take it, as the younger ones can...
...Peaceful folks behind the lines, having no 4>eare to shake or arms to clash, ha#nothrag to say...
...And as far as mere endurance is concerned, there are piobably institutions in South America which tovrmanaged to exist during more calendar years than any of our schools...
...If ah opposite counterpart to the term 'democratic' is in order, the regime must be spoken of as 'authoritarian.' But it is neither totalitarian nor semi-totalitarian...
...It is always well to call customs into question...
...A few of the more outstanding items are Col...
...Farrar & Rinehart...
...Soon four more Communist banners were an integral part of the procession and, so help me, they all started singing the Indian equivalent of The Internationale...
...It was a futile search for a lost heritage...
...In fact, it was rumored that the organizing drives on the Lakes were stymied because of Abar...
...And in a weary world he found an audience ready to listen to stories of futility...
...West for action, East for status...
...This- great comedian has suddenly become a political philosopher, and these are his discoveries: "/ want to clarify the air...
...West for profanity, East for piety...
...Our present Army is probably the oldest on the face of the earth, and the experts say that is about the only thing that is wrong with it...
...TTHE CATHOLIC INTERNATIONAL, EXPOSED in these pages one story last spring as another attempt by cierico-faecist to spread the Social Justice line, will resume publication on a monthly basis in a fortnight or so...
...He will pull no chestnuts out of the war fire for France...
...This first volume, an eccentric melange of history, criticism, and prophecy, is concerned with the "two-way pull in American culture"— "the peculiar fact of east-to-west movement, west-to-east memory...
...The fact that the national parliament of Brazil does not meet, that the state legislatures have been disbanded end are ruled by men appointed by the federal government, which means by Vargas himself, that many arbitrary acts have been committed against the press and against political opponents, is by no means denied...
...Of course we are the lone survivors, of course the past is at the bottom of an abyss...
...The Sinews ef Total War," and "Hitler's Grand Strategy...
...Ike <#ome tynant . . v .. *Y WILUAI* E. BOHN itemed Age and Youth jjfl .oologies to Harvard, to William and Mary and to Keith HlMcGary...
...The fact that the University of Wisconsin, a very youthful upstart, has been doing this sort of thing for nearly twenty years is nothing against the venture...
...West for democratic color, East for aristocratic form...
...It is, in fact, meritorious in the old to imitate the young...
...Incidentally...
...All that we know about prize fighters and professional baseball players supports their view...
...the rules of law governing the political society are not agreed upon by the people, but superimposed by the government from above...
...What Nuhn is doing most of the time is speculating in half-truths and in a kind of metaphorical, analogical criticism which veers on the border between validity and nonsense...
...The mildly evangelical purpose hinted at in the announcement is probably not to be taken too seriously...
...pOLLOWING THEIR ATTACK ON ARCHIBALD MacLE^SH, * the Communists have switched to A. A .Berle and are spreading a whole slew of rumors to the effect that he is on the rollers and will be fired from the State Department...
...It is downright false to indict them for an alleged neglect of "their own," without examining (with some sympathy) the particular social and cultural situation and its issues, impulses, and crises...
...So any deal with Petain must also work in his favor...
...said "that queer monster, the artist, an inexhaustible sensibility," carried on...
...Men and institutions who or which boast of the number of days «ad years through they have managed to maintain existence more and ntore give me pains in various parts of my anatomy...
...The author cites many such instances...
...3.75...
...pro-Nazi sympathies, and how, daring the conference held at Rio in January of this year, Vargas cast his lot with the United Nations, following which, a few months later, he dismissed all his pro-Nazi advisers...
...Last week', under a meatless Tuesday cut...
...They're not wild people, they don't eat their young...
...This is the Germany we must know, as well as the Germany of the universities and the trade unions, if we are to insure against the recurrence of the present catastrophe in the event of a democratic victory...
...QESPITE the title, which might convey the impression that this book was written for the* purpose of showing all "the great things Vargas did for BraziT-wn short a glorification of that country's dictator—this is a very honest book, and certainly one of the best available on the present situation of that country...
...All of which does not mean that Brazil's is an ideal regime, hut it is less detestable than any European totalitarian dictatorship . . . and furthermore Vargas is our ally, and we tolerate other dictators in our struggle, the main purpose of which is to destroy the Nazi brand of totalitarianism first...
...606...
...All over Europe compulsory military service started at 18...
...Walt Disney's Donald is threatening legal action . » * * TTHERE IS A SLIGHT SENSE OF DAZE among many peap^ * who have learned that the Artists' Front to Win the War, latest CP...
...a boy or girl of lfeor 20 necessarily less prudent and independent than one of twenty-one...
...When will William Green and Phil Murray be decked out with hoods and towns...
...Because they want prudence, because they have no will of their own...
...German military literature is full of discussions of the new developments in warfare...
...James's novels are peopled with Americans who are sacrified on the altar of European beauty and civilization: Isabel Archer of Portrait of a Lady, Lambert Strether of The • Ambassadors, Maggie and Adam Verver of The Golden Bowl, among others...
...Henry James, Nuhn suggests, would like Isabel Archer, have been "better on*" if he remained in Albany, New York...
...Berle never had any dealing with any of the people named, and for the most part has never even met them...
...Cooley is 45 and had been turned down...
...So-let's have a constitutional amendment...
...Among the labor students who Will live carefree months about the ancient Yard will be four members of our International Ladies Garment Workers, three from the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and at least two men from the United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers...
...This »a» turned into the basis for an argument against votes lor »orkingmen...
...According to James Madison, Gouverneur Morris^said m the Constitutional Convention: "Children do not vote...
...But let that pass...
...It is as a matter of fact a more or less familiar historical and critical idea...
...Rockefeller's 18th century reproduction a distinction ? which Harvard can hardly lay claim: "In 1688 three pirates named Davis, Delawater and Hmson contributed 300 pounds to the College of William and Mary in what became Williamsburg rather than be hung by the neck till dead, dead, dead and rotting on a food strong chain till they rotted and fell away...
...Ort« for Fighters...
...I recall reading in one of my school histories that in the national assemblies of the early German tribes, important questions such as declaring war or making peace were settled by the body of armed men, the citizenship, by the shaking of spears °r the clash of arms...
...Pochhammer's ideas on sea warfare and power politics...
...General Erfuth's clear explanation of the cooperation of units of an army...
...The basic thesis seems to me wrongheaded and invidious...
...Chaplin, said...
...i~i...
...Why7 ?? not «hanging times, shifting conditions, modern education make any...
...As for Eliot, who was born in Missouri, it grieves the author that he never grew up to be poet-laureate of St Louis gas-houses...
...AP, and ArchsSteele, Chicago Daily Neves, had gone into a section of the native quarter to check on a strike which was in progress...
...A PHILIP RANDOLPH, A LEADING NEGRO UNIONIST, ·*· may take his Sleeping-Car Porters out of the American Federation of Labor in protest over the discrimination by some AFL unions against the Negro and the hedging tactics of the Toronto Congress...
...The rider a useless and good-for-nothing institution is the more it should he ashamed of itself...
...There is a tug at any man's heart when he thinks about a youth of 18, just a boy, putting on a uniform and going out to •hoot and be shot at...
...If a boy is intelligent *nough to shoot bullets, why can't he drop a ballot...
...And in Seattle, Mrs...
...But Abd-el-Krim hates the French with an overwhelming passion...
...But the men on the General Staff have just one'job—to get the best Army possible...
...men of 40 or 45...
...Loewenstein by no means denies that the Vargas regime is an authoritarian dictatorship but he makes a very interesting and well formulated distinction between this type of South American authoritarian dictatorships and the European totalitarian regimes...
...Students in the Harvard School of Business Administration are not taken in for the purpose «f converting them to a better relationship with labor...
...They had in fact in the few months before the crash of war been corresponding...
...The story of Henry Adams is akin to that of James...
...West for function, East for ornament...
...LJERE'S A FUNNY STORY WHICH APPEARED originally * in the A ? house organ...
...With the incomes of millionaires shrinking in the hot sun of the income tax, what better source of revenue presents itself laan the gorged union treasuries to which Westbrook Peglar has given so much publicity...
...The background of the new executives, some virtually unknown until recently, would, if probed, reveal interesting international associations with war industries east of the Rhine...
...Since he is on a prison island, this may not seem like much to you...
...Perhaps the University of Chicago and Leland Stanford will speak up now in defense of their own robber barons...
...The author does not seek to present the Vargas regime as a "pure democracy...
...CERNER NUHN'S The Wind Blew From the * East, which is subtitled "a study in the orientation of American culture," is one of a group of three dealing with different strands in our literary past...
...THE GAELIC AMERICAN, Coughlinite weekly, was offered an * ad by the Elizabeth Gurley Flynn campaign committee...
...I take it that Mr...
...among the generals will do in case of a successful landing of the Axis on Brazilian soil...
...As Nuhn points out, Adams' book took its place with Proust, Hemingway, Joyce and Eliot as . postwar literature, the literature of the Lost Generation of exiles and international wanderers, which had followed on Henry James' beglamoured generation of pilgrims and aesthetes...
...Grover, in convulsions, ran ahead of the group and made a picture of Steele leading the procession under the Red Flag, much to the latter'* serious-minded embarrassment...
...Here are weary, middle-aged lovers, lost sailors, haunted souls, bitter and evil old men, Acting out nightmares of bondage in dark towers of the waste land...
...The formal announcement suggests that the project is designed "to create a better relationship between labor and management...
...If it means that the Vichyites an tend to release him, all hell is liable to break out in Morocco...
...McGary means the second college to be founded in the United States, for the University of Mexico, I have been told, was laid out in 1651...
...The Waste Land is seen in the great tradition of "descents into hell" (Virgil's being into the classical infernal regions, Dante's into the medieval hell, Eliot's into a modern hell...
...it showed a chef holding up an alleged chicken...
...Just as the political aims of the Nazis ware never kept secret, so the military .techniques by which these aims were to be realized were never withheld...
...Abar, according to talk, was long suspected of having connections with the Lake Carriers Association...
...Part of their technique is to link his name to a strange melange of Greszinsky, Kerensky...
...transmission belt outfit, had the blessings of the British Broadcasting Company...
...Young Monroe's contention, too, has a very ancient tradition back of it...
...In that conclave, votes were denied to children because they lack prudence and independence...
...But let that pass...
...and James once replied: "I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, and I know not how to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated blackness...
...but it has worked with us a good while and made currents and eddies that may last a long while still...
...They are mothers who kiss their sons goodbye, perhaps never to see them again, as American mothers are doing...
...boundaries 'has a rifht to be proud.' Since you are talking of Virginia, I presume ? is that stete to which you refer and that the college is William and Mary...
...Twenty-one has long been regarded as the age of maturity...
...He simply moves blindly, indiscriminately from problems of politics and society (democracy, nationalism, world order, etc...
...If a man or a college has to draw attention to its (or his) existence by referring "» length of days, that in itself is evidence of futility and failure...
...Must it forever remain as «? watershed between foolishness and wisdom...
...HIS volume of essays culled from German military literature from Clausewitz to Hitler reveals the German genius for warfare...
...I foresee a day when university presidents will, with corrugated brows, attempt to distribute honors equitably between CIO and A3PL...
...it is better not to harbor too many illusions about the loyalty of some of the Brazilian leaders to the cause of democracy, who may pay lip service now...
...The helpful Hindu summoned a lad who...
...German Military Men By TOM WINS LOW THE AXIS' GRAND STRATEGY...
...or maybe a Paul Engle, who is "growing wise" in Iowa...
...3.00...
...He was brought up on charges and suspended for one year—a mild sentence when you recall the 99-year suspensions which hapless anti-Communist oppositionists in the NMU were handed...
...McGary gently draw, my attention to a boner »Weh covers me with shame: "There is an item fai your Home Trout column this week which I would like to call into question Near the end of the column I find the following sentence 'The ^itate that founded the first college within our...
...Edited for the Committee for National Morale, by Ladislaus Farogo...
...Thomas Stearns Eliot is the last pilgrim-exile te the elder world...
...The fact that the fourteen students were selected by their unions tod mat the cost is defrayed, in part, from union treasuries indicates that the plan is on a solid organizational basis...
...Totalitarian,' on the other hand, refers to a way of life, to social factors...
...It's humiliating, but it's so...
...He also tells bow, until not much longer than a year ago, many of the highest government officials—among them the Rio de Janeiro Chief of Police, who has cabinet rank, the Ministers of War and Justice— had outspoken...
...If a college is not producing good men and good ideas now, then it merely cumbers the earth and has no right to boast...
...But one's reflections don't really bear being uttered...
...The sight of two white men in uniform (war correspondents wear Army uniforms sans insignia) following a Communist banner in broad daylight was a little too much for the natives...
...TTHERE MAY BE VERY SERIOUS REPERCUSSIONS ht * Morocco if the story about Abd-el-Krim is tree...
...This is a double-edged sword...
...stand up...
...Rumoring around are stories concerning Charles Abar, persona] friend and bodyguard to M. Hedley Stone of the NMU...
...OUT now comes Monroe Lerner and shoots these words at us ? In last weeks New Leader: "Do we not need young blood » our country's politics just as we need it in our armed forces...
...The Wind Blew From the East is in some ways, as I have said, an original and stimulating piece of work—but it is brightly-phrased where it might have tightly-reasoned, and it tries to make up in fleeting cleverness for a deficient systematic control of the central problem...
...If he is given arms to fight the United Nations, he will also use them against France...
...But the Party has always followed the Hitler precept that * lie, if i^-peated often enough, will in time be accepted as fact...
...Adams only saw his way through to writing the Education (1918), a bleak, dispiriting document of "chaos" and "failure...
...The message of "the East Wind," as it has come to our shores and then blown across the country, he sums up as: "West for work and money, back East for ease and grace...
...Nuhn finds, is the story of a naive response to romantic Europe which "like a definite sort of tropism seemed to be set from the first toward that glamourous distant light...
...Charlie Chaplin's speech was a lulu...
...TTHE JOURNAL-AMERICAN'S CAPTION WRITERS...
...But it has no...
...There is also a lot of breezy American history, cheap cracks about intellectuals, superficial comments on Marxism, and a mess of second-rate philosophizing about everything-in-general...
...Angry members, who could not prove these insinuations, were nevertheless able to get him transferred the hell away from the Lakes and to Port ArtSer...
...I have been going about since last week presenting our young correspondent's contention...
...CIDNEY HILLMAN, OPM CO-DIRECTOR until his illness, is *~ returning to Washington, where he will be active as a personal adviser on labor to the President...
...Keep your eye on this...
...He is intent on counseling American writers "to grow wise in Omaha...
...But James, because he was as he...
...Harvard University—like the eborehes, the United States government and the radto chains—has recognized the trade unions...
...The notes by the editors are usually well taken, bear directly on the text, and are in general extremely helpful...
...According to Associated Press reports, the former leader of the Riffian revolt has pledged his support of the Vichy regime...
...should learn some ornithology...
...Lois de Lafayette Washburn, who was ferreted out by The New Leader's Kenneth Vaughn, is asking her friends all over the country to buy that issue of The New Leader to see for themselves "how they are smearing us...
...Steele and Grover, incidentally*, are about as Communistic as Herbert Hoover...
...The Artist as Un-American By MELVIN J. LASKY THE WIND BLEW FROM THE EAST...
...OtUute xrtd...
...It was a duck...
...We have moved on from James' wide-eyed young provincials wandering bedazzled in the old palace gardens, from adolescent dreams of union with the en...
...to do with literature than a Tuesday-afternoon Rotary Club lecture...
...But without referring to the charming hall designed by Sir Christopher Wren she does give the college in Mr...
...A youth of 18 is very close to the point where he is physically at the top...
...The wind may be dying down...
...And they say that on ?? average the young boys, jn the long run, make better fighters...
...They represent an excellent selection from an enormous field, and show well the main problems the German militarists faced: how to overcome the defensive power of the enemy, gain a quick victory, develop new methods and weapons of warfare, and how to solve the riddle of the gelation between political and military leadership...
...The volume remains, nevertheless, a fine achievement— a guide to the warfare of today...
...A crowd gathered, most of whom fell in line behind the correspondents, evidently to see where this strange hegira might lead...
...but it is so wildly and irresponsibly presented here as almost to invalidate everything in it.- It is misleading to speak of "the Lost Generation" as if it were not a general cultural predicament from the Montmarte to San Francisco bay...
...Abar has since rushed to New York to weep on Stone's shoulder and plead for reinstatement...
...Inter-Office: "Preston Grover...
...Chautemps, etc...
...It is, thus (although it never quite manages that strident note of red-blooded patriotism of a Van Wyck Brooks), another critical exercise in the new resorgent literary nationalism...
...It is unfair to say that James-Adams-Eliot used history merely as a refuge, for not the least of their contributions was a clearer perception of the importance' and meaning of "tradition" and "the historical sense...
...Then the NMU gained some ground, enough to worry the Lake Carriers Association, anyway...
...APPOINTMENTS to high posts in the recently revamped war production set-up raised many an eyebrow in Washington...
...And the bombs and shrapnel of World War I shattered the image of Europe as a beautiful museum-—as James himself wrote in his historic letter of 1914: "The plunge of civilisation into this abyss of blood and darkness is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while making for and meaning is too tragic for words...
...But the moral is the same: there is no turning back...
...It seems very likely that the collaborationists expect him to rally Riff and Moorish sentiment against Britain and the United States if another front is opened in western North Africa...
...You have the BBC playing bay with (he second-front agitators at the vary time that Churchill asks Commons not to insist on discussion of this vital move...
...a Robert Frost...
...Your weapons of war were your only voting credentials...
...The stosy of Henry James, Mr...
...A few weeks ago,: John Armour asked: "Why should we rat off the bud of our youth...
...Monroe does not propose a return to this limitation of the suffrage But it does give him ,the support of ancient usage...
...Whereupon Abar quit his $60 a week job with the NMU and rushed back to the Lakes, where be functioned unofficially...
...The charming Miss Moore is more accurate than I—though her date does not agree precisely with that given by Mr...
...Pretty good, eh, Joe...
...The only serious adverse remark one can make is that the editors would have done well to include a number of more recent essays, that is, those written on specific compaigns in this war and those reviewing events in general...
...If this is the case, the statenient is in error, for William and Mary was the «eeoitd college to be founded in Ameriea, in 1693 the nrst being, of course, Harvard...
...All this certainly is very good "Americanism...
...Norman Corwin's speech to the Carnegie Hall rally was short-waved through BBC transmitters and the whole program was recorded and shipped to Britain for broadcast there...
...More than that, it argues itself on to false and dangerous grounds, for what it seems to be trying to give us is a portrait of the artist as un-American...
...That is what the East Wind says...
...to subtle problems of art and culture (literary tradition,'alienation, aesthetic integrity, etc...
...The ignorant and the dependent can be as little trusted...
...When Nuhn is good, he is very bright, and when he is bad, he is pedestrian and silly...
...By Ferner Nuhn, Harpers...
...He is an old-style nationalist...
...Technically"—he writes—"Brazil is a full fledged dictatorship...
...Henry Adams could have been saved by Emerson's Concord or Whitman's Camden...
...McGary-"William and Mary is the second oldest college in the United States, having been founded in 1696...
...von Schaefer's lucid discussion of the art of war...
...Things are looking up...
...Does this recall the time when the Daily Worker accepted ads from isolationist outfits...
...What made that particular year, the twenty-first, the dividing line...
...Who, what are the Communists...
Vol. 25 • October 1942 • No. 43
