A Page of Features
A Page of Features Americana Books and Writers Chatter The Home Front By WILLIAM E. BOHN Walton Hamilton Vs. Henry Hazlitt THAT we heed a new constitution every intelligent citizen...
...Although an expert maker of maps, he is not hypnotized hjr them, showing that one may get a "global picture" without "looking at several different map projections at the same time" as Nicholas J. Spykman does, according to his own word...
...The atmosphere at Cordell Hull's press conference this week fairly bristled...
...It will be called "The Companies We Keep...
...This is our second blueprint to peace...
...Beginning with the Interstate Commerce Commission, we have created a hodgepodge series of commissions, bureaus and authorities to deal with each area of trouble as It grew hot...
...By J. F. Horrabin...
...In this crisis his America, "a - marvelous accident of history," must save humanity...
...British monopoly as the carrier of goods from northern Europe to the Mediterranean area was broken by Germany's railway lines, and the Berlin-Baghdad scheme, if it had not been smashed by the war of 1914-1918, would have threatened Britain's Suez route...
...In The Beloved Returns, Mann did not try to write a novel based on the manipulation of ideas almost solely, and the book is not a success for that reason: Goethe communing with himself does not impress the reader of that novel to the extent that the minor parts of the book do, describing the peculiar stuffily sycophantic yet brilliant atmosphere of Weimar under Goethe...
...Culbertson's modernistic home—with his office at one end of a great room and a completely equipped bar at the other-one college professor got a good lesson...
...things start happening...
...But Thomas Mann has lived in no single world...
...From tar and wide, Socialists and liberals and working-class figures came to pay tribute to one of the last of the 'Great Rebels...
...lut the greatest of all Mann's works, the Joseph saga, in which his characteristic expansiveness is given full scope, is almost ignored by Mr...
...The supremacy of the European states bordering the Atlantic was next challenged, this time by the opening of land routes over vast continental areas by the westward expansion of the United States and the eastward expansion of Russia...
...Time was when Raymond Moley was a professor himself, and even a New Deal braintruster...
...Many a reader has since dissented...
...As an old hand at syndicalism and Sorel, I thought I had found a point where no point was stated...
...The oceans, like the desert, were once a barrier...
...He quotes extensively from Ellen Semple, the American interpreter and ardent pupil of Ratzel...
...He paraphrases Mann skillfully and quotes judiciously...
...THE title of this book is perhaps unfortunate...
...Taken to Germany, they may be bargained off in an exchange for the interned members of the German Armistice Commission in North Africa...
...While the fellow-travelers are disowning -Contreras, the Daily Worker defertkhhn for "his record in Spain" (!) and as a "Mexican patrieC** . . . The Party-line being circulated is that it waa a "sex crime...
...A cross the Seas:—Bella Fromm is the celebrated German society reporter who ungraciously told Rrbbentrop, when he kissed her hand: "The hand is non-Ary*n, Your Excellency...
...the Secretary irf State cracked: better keep your mind on the bombs and the battles...
...We do expect a critic,'however, who writes a whole book about Mann to examine these changes with some care and to endeavor to explain them with some reference to underlying ideas and causes...
...The Jonathan Stout War-Profits exposes in these columns have sent correspondents scurrying for the data...
...Just another Kremlin Gremlin (see out) at work...
...Or you can write in order to help those who have read and thought about the original works of the Master to achieve some new insight into his ideas and his art...
...So—thirty years later—this g rl appeared in his dream and pleaded: "If you will only develop one little idea you would justify your whole selfish life...
...Awayback in 1937 1 ie received a revelation during a nostalgic intermin on the Left BanlJ of the Seine...
...and, finally, for W.P.B...
...But the fact is that for all of Mann's love of philosophy and his many allusions to it, his ideas, when isolated from his works of art, are neither very profound nor very original...
...He had been exposed in these columns a year ago in connection with the mysterious death of Tina Modotti who had been his wife, who had broken with the Comintern, end who had been an intimate friend of Juliet Poyntz, that strange Soviet disappearance case which Tresca had tried to break here in New York...
...A crowd of belligerent Indian nationalists approached...
...Clark Gable tor star billing...
...I hereby confess that the jewels found on me do not belong to me and in trying to take them out...
...Both in war and peace the President, Congress and the courts are concerned with the impact of corporately managed business and industry on the public interest...
...Then the Mediterranean in its turn was supplanted as the main street of commerce when Columbus opened the Atlantic to Portugal and Spain, and thus to France, the Netherlands and England...
...Knopf...
...Nadya had < ied in a Black Hundred pogrom...
...There are two ways of writing a study of a "writer...
...Columbia University Press...
...Too many professors...
...Item: Warner Bros, is making a film version of This Is the Army and has asked the military to lend them Lieut...
...They must be able to act quickly and tjo take responsibility...
...When the story appeared, he was amazed to find that "Contreras had been expelled from Russia by Stalin" and that "Contreras had been associated with the Trotskyites in Mexico...
...For wide sections of our population his figure has genuine glamor...
...Take these and burn her up...
...When asked about *H9ie political muddle...
...It is a competent and intelligent summary of Mann's ideas, but any cne who has read Mann for himself will find the book a waste of time, and those who have not read Mann .will scarcely be interested enough to read Mr...
...Last summer, Goebbels completed bis film of Victory in Africa...
...To carry the author's illustration further, if man learns to exploit fully the Arctic shortcut between the" continents, it is not inconceivable that the Atlantic-^ and Pacific may be regularly by-passed and England left once more id a cul de sac...
...We want to burn your truck...
...But, it might be argued, Mann's ideas are important enough to justify such a secondhand account of them...
...Africa Speaks:—Slowly but surely people are opening up on the political chaos in North Africa, and Vafmire Peyroutor may take the Hd off things...
...Item: Milton Caitiff, TtM y-mmd-tkePirates comic-strip per, has been doing a risque special for Army papers, and the boys in the camps just love it...
...Two years ago Union Now w as riding high...
...I don't believe in blueprints, and I dislike Messiahs...
...And all were determined, through their tears, to break the Tresca case wide open...
...THOMAS MANN'S ideas, considered by them* selves as Mr...
...But, in the meantime, I wish h*e would tell me just why Henry Hazlitt's small Congress, well organized and with a responsible Cabinet and Prime Minister, wot Id not be just the sort of body to pull a sprawling government 1 ke ours together and make it click...
...nfashington Notes^—Reprinted from last week's stint: "One of " the most important world conferences of the war is due to open shortly, somewhere overseas...
...Meanwhile, one of our staff writers is preparing a report on the big U. S. corporations...
...Lippmann opens up...
...Now we have thirty governments inside the Unit sd Nations, and a large proportion of them would not fit into Streit ¦ ideologically limited Union Now...
...One copy of the movie has just been "captured" in North Africa...
...The Mediterranean became a back alley...
...True, he has recently made some true and significant remarks about the world situation ^ but the editorial writers of our progressive weeklies have been saying the same things for years, and nobody has written studies of them...
...he cried...
...Dees He Want a Corporative State...
...The proposal of all such new boundaries, however enlightened, only serves to underscore the dead end to which all boundary-mindedness inevitably leads, in a world of economic interdependence...
...Don't expect me to tell you what it is...
...Here finally was a murder that unraveled like those lurid international intrigues which poake are So fond of following in the palp magazines...
...Brennan has said so little about it...
...Warner studios, now completing the Da vies Mission to Moscow job, has dropped Clifford Odets from Rhapsody in Blue for adding "social significance" to the George Gershwin biography...
...You can paraphrase the writer's ideas, so as to enable the reader of your study to talk at literary cocktail parties as though he had read the original works himself...
...In other words, he tells those who have not bothered to read what Mann has written, just what ideas the Master has tried at various times to express...
...The Assistant Secretary of War has called in a commercial "publicity man to do a hatchet job on "the Seversky problem"—charges Wm...
...But there is enough here to show that my guess about the book review was correct...
...That nigh t the money-making master of the tournaments had a dream...
...0 These bodies work—well or badly—but they have no central control, no norm, no limits of authority...
...2.50...
...Lippmann knew Murphy in Washington and in Paris, and when he heard that it was h* who was to take over the politics of the North African invasion, be was "astonished...
...Now in New York, she has a copy of the paper she had to sign at the last Nazi frontier: "I am a Jewish thief and have tried to rob Germany by taking wealth out cf the country...
...It is easier for the great corporations .to get to these seats of power than for the people of this country to bring theii" influence to bear...
...l/ERY well} We have the main business of government in the * hands of commissions, bureaus and authorities which are not elected and which ought not to be elected...
...The man is a mystic combination of Russian messiah and Americar advertising man—of Tolstoi and Bruce Barton...
...Horrabin knows how to winnow the wheat from the chaff and he sticks to his own simple, straightforward story however fascinating the play of argument indulged in by others...
...He and Nac'ya had been dedicated to the cause of the people...
...Furthermore, I promise never to try to re-enter Germany...
...Caniff's syndicate has called it off, and now, while the war effort hangs perilously in the balance...
...Drinking Ely's cockta Is he grew lyrical about the charms of the democratic Russian Constitution...
...On his way to the International Bridge Tournament it Budapest, he stopped off for a month of thought *nd study...
...So we have dollar-a-year men running the War Production Board and making decisions which may put their concerns in a place where they will be sitting pretty st the end of the war...
...To ignore any inquiry into that peculiar ability to hammer away at reality until an impression of convincing solidity is achieved, which is Mann's greatest quality as a writer, is to ignore the only important thing about Thomas Mann...
...The exponents of the different points of view in The Magic Mountain are characters in a novel, not in a Socratic dialogue...
...According to Lippmann, Murphy was "passionately devoted" first to Daladier and then to Petain, and is qaite incapable of "cool and detached judgments...
...Sidney Hook's book on The Hero in History will soon be published...
...came the shout...
...Brennan's study of Thomas Mann is in the first category...
...The Commies, you see, are conducting a deliberate campaign to smokescreen the political trails lending So and out of the murder of Carlo Tresca...
...Brennan considers them, are not sufficiently striking to establish him as a great man...
...No doubt he has a book about Beady for the press...
...of hie new tract, The Machiavellians, a study of Pareto...
...Bewildered was the word for the New York detectives assigned to the case...
...Brennan must think so, and there is a vast number of persons in the United States who look on Mann more ,as a sage than as an artist...
...The point of it shows clearly which way the author's 'mind is working...
...206 pages...
...What Walton Hamilton had in the depths of his mind and never managed to transfer to paper was the notion that in this big busuess, technological age the concerns of government are quite diflnyent from what they were while the British were building up Parliament as a defense against the King—and that therefore we need a different sort of set-up...
...Shall it follow the old lines of responsible parliamentary government or the new lines of the corporative state...
...The alternatives would seem to be a corporat ive state...
...and Michels...
...But the sheltered inland sea of the Mediterranean with its numerous islands, peninsulas and promontories and lack of tides became "the nursery of seamen," and the glory of Egypt and Mesopotamia gave way to Aegean and Phoenician civilization...
...Simplicity but not oversimplification alee characterizes the 50-odd maps included in the small* volume...
...During and after the 1907 uprising in Russia he had belonged to the Social Revolutionists...
...He defended, however, the record of Minister Robert Murphy who, he said, could take care of himself...
...But America, thus seen glo ified from the Left Bank of the Seine, was under the control of two million stupid politicians...
...and W.L.B...
...Yet it is in this work that we can see most clearly that strange combination of reverie and realism, that disciplined digression, and that sense of history as psychology, which give Mann his stature as a novelist...
...Bradford Huie, in the current American Mercury...
...His confident blueprint is pathetically out-of-date long before the end of the war...
...Hollywood is as tight as a clam on the Hemingway-Franco censorship case, but we now learn that For Whom the Bell Tolls is being distributed for road-showings...
...It is impossible to separate the ideas from their treatment in any discussion of this work, and this is perhaps the reason why Mr...
...Naively he spelled out every foreign wood GPU, G as in George, P as in Paul, U as in Ulcere...
...By Joseph Gerard Brennan...
...find it for yourself...
...The question was thrown up a couple of weeks ago in* the innocent form of a book review...
...The protected and fertile valleys of the Nile, the Hwang-ho, the Tigris and Euphrates and the Indus nursed "cradle" civilizations...
...Even the all-powerful Pope's E«ct allotting the Western Hemisphere to Spain and the Eastern to Portugal could not negate the new favorable position of Europe's northwestern corner...
...I wrote a review of this volume for The New Leader and said that Hazlitt made out a good case...
...Civilization, he says, was born in river valleys, spread out into inland seas, then transformed the oceans into highways, and finally openofl up the great land masses of the continents by means of the railroad...
...That nig it in Mr...
...In his fictional handling of them he achieves stature as an artist—the massive architectonics,' the skillful manipulation of detail, the sense of form which suddenly turns a digression into a main motif—and Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain possess vitality almost in spite of the ideas they are meaat to convey...
...Washington, a brilliant analysis...
...The 'desert, Horrabin says, was a favorable geographic factor during the "cradle" stage of Egyptian civilization, because it was a protection against outside disturbances...
...They are reliable and to the point, clearly illuminating the geographical factors which influence events...
...But Hori-abin's concept of a Europe which conforms to the technological facts of the present time is based on a map of Derwent Whittlesey that divides Europe into four parts (Atlantica...
...In common with everyone else who read the sketch of it, I was under solemn oath not to print'j...
...Horrabin's cool analysis of the economic facts of geography is particularly useful at this time because he has not been seduced by any of those interesting generalizations called "natural laws" governing the life, of man and the forms of social organization which are today the sport of "Geopoliticians...
...There is no trickery about them and no ambiguity...
...But now, you see, he writes for the Wall Street Journal...
...Brennan...
...This is not to say that Horrabin avoids the use of geopolitical material...
...So the whole problem is left dangling...
...How did the "unpolitical man" (as Mann used to describe himself) come to turn away from the view that the true artist is an anti-social invalid to become the vocal champion of a humanistic democracy...
...The capitalist machine of Great Britain," he says, maintains a "fasqist" regime of discrimination against the blacks in South Africa and grants India a constitution based upon "safeguards'" and a "working alliance" between "British property interests" and "Indian property interests," which is maintained by the poverty, disease and ignorance of the masses...
...Hazlitt was simply bewildered—didn't know what the man was driving at...
...Freedom from ma porno ma permits him to contemplate the land masses and oceans withoot developing any special theories about "heartlands" and "world islands" (Mackinder) for lesser men to bully the world with...
...It was hastily withdrawn when Montgomery, far from being flung into the 'Red Sea, moved foi-ward to press Rommel against the Mediterranean...
...Not to mention the fact that the railroads have already outgrown any such fourway division of Europe...
...The reason why you saw those Herbert Hoover articles everywhere is that he told the major wire services that the Message was of Vital Importance and ought to have "the widest possible distribution...
...The first came from Clarence Streit— ilso an outsider, a mere journalist...
...Inside and Out By MATTHEW LOW Motes on the Tresca Case:—The big break in the Tresca story »™ came when the District Attorney hopped onto a GPU lead which led- directly to hatchet-man Carlos Contreras...
...1 here, in the library of Mont Ste...
...When Mr...
...This was a country to get out cf," she says, "even if you had to do it naked...
...The story of that diplomatic American in India is our favorite of the week: He was standing in front of his Army truck...
...Walton Hamilton did the, honors for The New Republic—in a long and^ rather turgid essay...
...The war merely hastened a process which was already speeding up...
...No business men...
...But there is an analysis of the seesaw of powers in...
...And unless we can appreciate Mann as a novelist, we shall never understand Thomas Mann's world—or worlds...
...General Nogues, who resisted the American landings and suppressed a pro-Allied revolt led by General Marie Emile Bothouart (now heading the military mission in Washington...
...Walton Hamilton seems to be all set to point the way, but he has not done so up to now...
...You csn't expect a man to sketch a new system of government in seven or eight columns...
...But it became the cause of that civilization's stagnation when development was hinged to expanding .communications...
...Finally he paused for a moment, breathless, aid asked Culbertson: "Have you read it...
...All of this is recorded in that engaging book, The Strange Lives °f One Man\ And the "one little idea" for which the phantom Nadya pleaded is the blueprint of World Federation which is soon to be spread jefore you...
...Horrabin's observation of this interdependence leads him to conclude that empires must be ended and the doctrines of racial superiority invented to justify them...
...In The New Republic he comes across with a piece on The Smoldering Constitutional Crisis...
...Some people are still trying to get out of Capitol Hill a clear statement of the extent of aid-toChina...
...The interjection of the dashing figure of bridge tournaments among statesmen and experts affords picturesque relief and is certain to serve useful puiposes...
...A bombshell of a challenge to that was offered by Columnist Walter Lippmann, who in his January 18 column summed up his conversational attacks on Murphy with what for htm is almost a violently worded polemic...
...But this meticulous outline of world-government does contain one >right idea...
...Then the prejudices would be thrown into one melting-pot instead of four...
...Among the correspondents are: David Darrah (Chicago Tribune), Mel Moat (AP), Lansing Warren (New York Times), and Ralph Heinxen (UP...
...Mosca...
...I—who am hardened to kings and presidents—looked the other evening with something approaching iwe at his card table and at wallpaper with bright face-cards in effective design...
...No," said Culbertsjjn, "I have* the Russian Constitution right here on this «aelf...
...Genevieve, he saw a vision...
...Brennan records this transition but he does not illuminate it...
...Nadja called him, Nadya the revolutionary sweetheart of his romantic and revolutionary days...
...THIS week we have-the privilege of viewing another chapter of Professor Hamilton's thinking...
...I guess we did more than that for our revolution...
...Contract V -idge to the Future PVER since last Fall I have been effervescing with interest in Ely Cult ertson's World Federation Plan...
...consequently the Pope's power declined, and, significantly, both Holland and England turned Protestant...
...Today a leading Stalinist, Elizabeth was associated with Tresca for twelve years of her life—and or, the day of his funeral cracked to the detectives: "Why don't you look for the killer among some hundred jealous husbands?' . . . Carlo Tresca's funeral, held last Saturday noon, was a moving and memorable event in American labor and radical history...
...But I will read it as soon as the Bolsheviks start to put it into practteel" Beyond Geo-Political Myths By KURT R. MATTUSCH AN OUTLINE OF POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY...
...You can talk about the world of Shakespeare or of Dickens or of Kipling, or of any writer who had a fairly stable background of preconceptions and assumptions among which he moved with confidence throughout his career...
...M-G-M practically sent a regiment of press and business agents into DC...
...alias Enes Sormenti...
...Nordland, Mediterranea, Grassland...
...Little news is coming through, but watch Moroccan Gov...
...He sjjw that "humanity was once more moving into the era of great wars and great revolutions, irresistibly impelled by the forces of the New Renaissance...
...This is the lesson of J. F. Harrobin's uAn Outline of Political Geography...
...157 pages...
...The chief business of government now is something that practically had no existence in 1787...
...She signed...
...Now the whole business is to break in next month's Reader's Digest...
...Geographical factors have presented man with problems to solve, but his solutions depend on social, technical and economic developments...
...Thus, advances in communication and transport, the location of certain raw materials and soils and man's power to produce have made world economic interdependence an "accomplished fact—or rather a process which is being intensified every day...
...THE main factors of geography, the distribution of land and water, of climate and rainfall, remain substantially the same throughout history, but "they are con-dj stantly changing in their effect and their importance...
...Professor Hamilton starts his discussion with a reference to our constitutional crisis, but he never gets round to discussing it in constitutional terms...
...If he doesn't want that, w'lat does he want...
...but he takes that brilliant geographer's statements only so far as they are based upon fact and not on theory...
...All kinds of strange appeals are coming these days to Washington for final decision...
...There is nothing to a writer's discredit in changing his intellectual abode, and no sensible person would think of abusing Mann for turning sharply away from the ideas he held in the first part of his life to embrace others which are in many respects the exact contrary...
...The iron ore of the Lorraine, for instance, is useless without the coal of the Ruhr...
...So again, in Washington offices a momentous decision is being prepared...
...And the moat scandalous Flynn item of the week involves Elizabeth Gurley Flynn...
...Observers are wondering if the President wasn't talking about dollar valae rather than tonnage...
...1.50...
...So last week The New Leader felt justified in disturbing the quiet surface of public thought with Elizabeth Charney's...
...Eyebrows were raised in shock and amazement when the columnist went on to call him "naive and gullible...
...Wflof to Do...
...The geographic position of England was not at all favorable at that time...
...A better title might perhaps have been "From World to World With Thomas Mann...
...Those who see man as "a piece of highly developed earth" (Kjellen), the state as a super-individual, and political history as the result of the "laws of growth" (Ratzel) of "geographic organisms" (Kjellen) will find little in Horrabin to stimulate their intuition...
...The Roosevelt figures about flying as much as used to go over the Burma Road surprised many...
...The man has certain clear advantages over bo :h politicians and scholars...
...Brennan...
...Something more than bewildered was that young Journal-American reporter when he saw how the story he phoned in finally appeared, fie called his city desk for a rewrite man—and whom did he get <H shouldn't even happen to a Hearst reporter...
...Sure," said he, taking a box of matches out of his pocket...
...They have grown pragmatically and do not fit into any democratic scene envisioned by the Foundingj Fathers...
...But after man learned to navigate the ocean, the barrier became a link, and today America's position is advantageous just because it is located between two oceans...
...It is a book for lazy men who want to be thought intelligent and well-read...
...It is hard to see, if political tradition and prejudice could be overcome to an extent that would make such a Europe possible, why a wholly United Europe would not be just as possible...
...The Indians gulped, laughed, departed...
...It is quite different from the current fashion in Geopolitics which produces such half-truisms as "mountain ranges stand unperturbed" (Spykman) and "uninhabitable areas form a dependable protective belt" (Haushofer) which are in constant danger of contradiction by such developments as the building of the Assam, and Burma roads, the Alaska highway, the tunneling of the Swiss Alps, the penetration of the Malayan and New Guinean jungles and air transport everywhere...
...But his ideas failed to emerge very dearly...
...Literati & Co.:—Seven U. S. war correspondents (formerly at Vichy) and a number of diplomats and other Americans were yielded to the Nazis this week...
...European political boundaries are "arbitrary barriers between raw materials and industrial centers, between groups of producers and groups of consumers...
...charming account of her interview...
...As a leading member of the French Imperial Council, he has remained one of the chief barriers to Giraud-De Gaulle unity, and it was partly to offset Nogues' influence that the British dispatched Minister Harold MacMillan...
...word...
...Yet these interrelationships are still flouted by political frontiers...
...Interpreting Thomas Mann By DAVID DAICHES THOMAS MANN'S WORLD...
...I was eager to inflict injury on Germany...
...Such an empire, he says, "cannot continue . . . once capitalism is ended...
...Since men are today world citizens, economically speaking, "national sovereignty must go—just a* tribalism in Africa must go...
...Comic relief for this week was furnished by Raymond Moley's blast against the Supreme Court appointments...
...Undoubtedly, Mr...
...To be effective, they mast have wide and flexible powers...
...If Thomas Mann is a writer of the "novel of ideas," it must nevertheless be remembered that it is the novels rather than the ideas that count...
...The Austro-Hungarian Empire was an economic unit built around the middle Danubian plain, but was broken up in numerous national states, which only nourished local patriotism, "an anachronism in the days of coal, iron, railroads and air-routes...
...These Horrabin describes with admirable balance and clarity...
...And James Burn ham has completed the ma...
...But there is no definite constitutional framework for them, no super-power to hold them in line J' What is tie way out...
...Bat what kind of a constitution...
...Henry Hazlitt wrote his book, A New Constitution Now, proposing a definite framework—with a small single-chambered Congress and a dabinet and Prime Minister responsible to it...
...He accused Hazlitt of trying to hand us an 18th century constitution near the middle of the20th century...
...The Federal Trade Commission and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation -paved the way for N.R.A...
...In that case, I am merely helping him work up a good wind for the launching of it...
...THIS is the important lesson of our time and * one that is often obscured in the popular mind by the emotionalism surrounding the Irredentist movements of the governments-in-exile...
...but a Certain prominent Stalinist in the Newspaper Guiio...
...Federal arbitrators are handling the ease...
...to stop Clark's release...
...The antithesis between the fragile artist and the robust bourgeois, which is the main theme of Buddenbrooks and of so many of Mann's short stories, was already a commonplace in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the affinities between art and disease (related to Mann's view of the relation between "nature" and "spirit") which The Magic Moutain expounds so artfully is a rather shabby article from the romantic lumber-room tricked out a little with psychoanalytic trimmings...
...Nadya Co/ ing MOW comes Ely Culbertson with just as definite a recipe for happiness...
...Henry Hazlitt THAT we heed a new constitution every intelligent citizen will agree...
Vol. 26 • January 1943 • No. 4
