Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
Where the News Ends By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN Mr. Straiahfs Brave New World I IKE everyone who is not a homicidal lunatic. **" I fee! the most cordial agreement with the aspiration expressed in...
...In spite of no-strike agrements, workers whose wages fall too far behind the cost of living will spontaneously stop work...
...In his public remarks on taking office he spoke rather complacently* about a gradual rise in living costs...
...It is to be presumed that some of the boys in the fox holes came from Detroit assembly lines...
...When the' Spanish civil war broke out in 1936, Roosevelt had no legal authority to embargo the Spanish government...
...for the Neutrality Act authorized embargoes in international war only...
...Our employed population is now creeping up from sixty millions toward seventy...
...The Captain knows all about flying...
...The author's bias crops out in such characteristic phrases as "our appalling overemphasis on individualism...
...the most cordial agreement with the aspiration expressed in the title of Michael Straight's new book...
...I believe that future historians will recognize that not the least reason why the wars of the twentieth century were so gigantic in scope and so ferocious in character was the destruction of nineteenth century individualism...
...He is eloquent and realistic in his preview of the world at the end of the war: "It is certain to be a world in which sheer physical survival is the overriding consideration...
...Perhaps his idea was that these rugged individualists will heroically insist on a long work week with low pay...
...Says FDR To Blame for Spain Tragedy From SAMSON HORN To the Editor: It was Roosevelt and nobody else who clapped the embargo on Loyalist Spain...
...His latest book isThe Joseph Conrad Argosy...
...Cooperative Councile in China, Communal Councils in India, Neighborhood Councils in Britain, town meetings in America, revolutionary democratic cells underground in occupied Europe...
...He makes the extravagant overstatement that in 1932 "American economy was powerless to prevent widespread starvation in the presence of unlimited resources...
...McFee Hits Thomas Wolfe, Heminqway, Plugs Tarkington From WILLIAM McFEE ~To the Editor: I regret the irascible tone of my letter about Mr...
...Any man who attempts to turn them against each other is trying to divide relatives, fellow workers, fellow citizens...
...Oil where so many human lives have been blighted by Gestapos, GayPayOos and lesser organizations of terrorist sncopers...
...To the extent to which he succeeds he injures his country...
...but many reviewers drag in some little-read author to clinch an argument...
...Industrial and agrarian production will be brought to a halt...
...It so happened that I had just finished reading, for the third tirrfeT "Alice Adams...
...One would suppose that confidence must be • two-way proposition...
...Wallace displayed when he implied, in the coui-se of a tribute to the Soviet Union, that this business of "Bill of Rights democracy" could be overdone...
...Kazin's book, and you may take it for what it is worth, and that was his smug brushing-off a man like Tarkington, for instance...
...During recent weeks spokesmen of our General Staff, have expressed a desire to raise our Army figure to ten millions and our over-all figure to thirteen millions...
...Without turning nry head, it warms my heart...
...Nobody was astonished when A merican business, bless its golden heart, cooperated almost unanimously...
...And, like most of those who "turned to Russia for leadership" without any first-hand knowledge of Soviet realities, he falls into gross errors of perspective and historical analysis...
...They get excited over "Look Homeward Angel" and omit to sec that if Wolfe had not read "Ulysses' he would never have written it...
...Members of the farm bloc accepted his words with approbation...
...He is on the right side when be recommends dealing with whatever democratic forces may be released by defeat in Germany and Japan...
...Randolph's reflections and statements are timely and thought-provofeing...
...I had just returned after the war...
...Primarily the decision as to the number of men needed to beat the Germans and the Japanese must be reached by our General Staff...
...Mrs...
...January 26...
...Keep it up...
...Kazin seems rather amused than otherwise about Tar-.kington...
...Straight, according to the publisher...
...They should be carefully conned by officials of Office of Price Administration and of the War Labor Board...
...Don't we all remember these things...
...Congress was not then in session...
...The difficulty arises from the fact that we take for granted that the>cost of living has been stabilized when as a matter of fact it has not...
...TT*HE question as to how large the American * Army should he is an extremely complicated one It involves important military, economic and social problems...
...There are times when I say to myself, while reading American critics of our time, they may refer to these older writers, but they have never really read them...
...Together with the personnel of the Navy and the Marines, this would give us a fighting force of near eleven millions...
...We were formerly told that there must be sixteen persons working to supply one man in the fighting forces...
...Congress complied at once...
...Pleas to give Russia a prominent place in the councils of the United Nations are rather curiously accompanied by a realistic admission, in one place, that Russia has vouchsafed a minimum of confidence, even when it was a question of receiving American military and other supplies...
...1943...
...This has always been an unmilitary nation...
...That is a shabby alibi...
...It would seem to the unmilitary mind that with more than seven millions in the Army, about two millions in the Navy and something like two millions in the Marines we shall have as large a military and naval force as we can supply, transport and use to advantage...
...There are some excellent features of lit Straight's book...
...An effort to obtain authority for this increase probably will be made in the near future...
...The remarks coming from President David DubiDsky, loyal supporter of the Washington administration, must be taken with the utmost seriousness...
...How-can anybody forget them...
...It is precisely the kiting of prices desired by these farm politicians which neads to such strikes as this which is now taking place...
...It seems to show as defective a sense of values as Mr...
...And in any case it was not a very interesting novel...
...that the only "widespread starvation" in 1932 was in the Soviet Union, when the planned starvation of the peasants in Ukraina and the North Caucasus took a toll of human lives that has never been paralleled in a land where the people enjoyed those guarantees of individual liberty which Mr...
...All the conditions will exist for the worst plagues in 600 years...
...These military authorities have officially held from the start that the correct figure is somewhere near 7,600,000...
...Straight's remedy for a distraught world than I am able to recognize...
...But more than twenty thousand dress makers have been on strike...
...This is a provocative letter and it is so intended...
...But a little later he spoke slightingly of the short work-week...
...I have read a number of such books in recent years and they all seem to me to ignore the best books in American literature and concentrate on the best-sellers ""and the politically-radical novels...
...The fact that these dress makers asserted this right quietly and were allowed to assert it proves that the war has, thus far, not destroyed our civil liberties...
...the first American to be elected President of the Cambridge Union, an associate of Roosevelt's famous Cohen-and-Corcoran team of advisers, an economist in the State Department, and an editor of The \eu- Republic...
...I have enough common sense and humor not to believe all the praise that has been heaped upon me...
...The recent debate"on the Anti-poll tax measure and its historic defeat in Congress.by the Southern Congressmen was particularly discouraging and portentous at this time of world struggle...
...Tomorrow when we court her wisely and win her she may be withered and gray...
...In the January 5»th issue of The New Leader, T. R. Greene writes in his weeping story on Congress that "once again Mr...
...In these portions of his address he spoke patently as a business executive completely without authority to represent the fighting men...
...He reveals the source of his political and economic inspiration when he writes that in 1938 "the most active minority within us had turned from their own countries and to Russia for leadership...
...Roosevelt will be forced to 'play ball' with the conservative elements who prevented his lifting the embargo on arms to Loyalist Spain...
...I felt that the author's aspiration ran ahead of his gift for implementation...
...But Mr...
...Straight seems to have faith, at once touching and naive, in the possibilities of an order where there will be no check on the power of the bureaucracy to boss around the individual, for his own good, of course...
...This last paragraph of Mr...
...He even took on the color of Joyce like a chamelion...
...Randolph's article can be accepted as a solemn warning to the American people who support such a spurious democracy and are apparently fighting to maintain it...
...We shall ignore the truth of this statement at our peril...
...A LL of which is probable almost to the point *¦ of certainty and ought to give pause to the easy optimists who foresee a brighter and better world at the end of the war...
...How-can anybody try to whitewash that crime...
...Many fhousands have gone to war from those lines...
...The embargo was Roosevelt's baby and nobody should attempt to deprive him of it...
...the embargo was clapped on, and at the deadline the Coast Guard chased the Mar Canta-brico out of New York harbor and nearly caught her...
...If the war does not achieve racial, economic, political and social equality for the Negro, it will have been fought in vain and will be only a prelude to a more terrible war between the colored and white races of the world...
...jacket, is a very precocious young man...
...Sometimes he falls into a penitential breast-beating mood, as when Me w rites: "Our utter inability to come to the aid of the Russians when they were saving us was so terrible that it is hard to see now how we-shall ever regain their confidence...
...The author ties himself up in knots of contradiction about Russia...
...The war controls which should be regarded as necessary evils, he interprets as "opportunities...
...The War Labor Board has taken over the case, and the strikers have gone back to their shops...
...In fact, the author, while preaching a crusade against Axis totalitarianism, seems to favor a somewhat more humane, but not essentially very different kind of regime for the brave new world which he envisages, with the individual a robot in the hands of an omniscient and omnipotent bureau-carcy that would train him in the way he should go...
...I hope to answer all such messages, but it will take time...
...I have been long in sympathy with the democratic aspirations of the Negro and Mr...
...iiiriiiiirr'i'HHitmiiiiHini Supports Plea By Randolph For Negroes From ROSALIE HOTSON To the Editor: In your very interesting issue of December 26 I, especially was stirred by reading the article "The Negro and U.S...
...transportation and communications will be completely broken down: all reserves of foodstuffs, clothing and fuel will be entirely used up...
...McFee is the author of many novels of the sea...
...He himself begot the embargo by means of a special message to Congress...
...The War Labor Board adopted the Little Steel formula on the theory that after September, 1942, there would be little, if any, increase in prices...
...Military leaders are constantly under temptation to increase our forces for other than purely military reasons...
...This is the first time in this war that we have had from any military leader such a blatant proclamation against the ideals' of organized labor...
...After reading it three times, I maintain that it is an important American novel...
...but she is still young and fair...
...It is aimed at dividing men who belong together, who have the same aims and the same interests...
...The estimate has now-sunk as low as seven or eight...
...The further the development of mechanization goes, the more important is it to stop at the right point, to attain the right balance between men under arms and men in the factories and on the farms...
...As Stendahl is one of my hobbies I am sensitive...
...No group of people anywhere could be further from any idea of throwing a monkey-wrench into our industrial setup...
...The men at home are trying to maintain decent living standards to which the temporary soldiers may return...
...Hi...
...HOW IIG AN ARMY...
...It must be confessed that crur President himself seems to lack the- moral courage to challenge those traitors to democracy, and the implications are inevitable and incontrovertible...
...The OPA regulations which failed to keep down the prices of bread and milk and meat do set ceilings for the dress trade which make it difficult for the manufacturers to accede to the demands of •the' workers...
...To compare a craftsman who could create Alice Adams with a blundering wah-wah writer like Dreiser or a half-demented ranter like Thomas Wolfe seems to me to indicate your critics have ho standards and really do not know where they are...
...No agreements can prevent walk-outs if inflation continues at its present rate...
...But the problems have not been solved...
...I think your critics are pretentious because they are everlastingly afraid to praise some book that is really good like "Merton of the Movies" for instance...
...As soon as Congress convened, in January of 1937, Roosevelt rushed in a special message, requesting that the Neutrality Act be so amended as to allow him to embargo a government in case of civil war...
...We must have effective price regulation or else...
...This is the point I am coming to, that American critics have a tendency to deal with bdoks that are sensational rather than good reading...
...Under American and international law, he had to allow shipments to the Spanish government while embargoing the rebels...
...Democracy" by A. Philip Randolph...
...Prentiss M. Brown, the new OPA chairman, should see in this stoppage a serious warning...
...The longer the war proceeds, the greater the danger to this tradition...
...There is an ominus sound to some of the Captain's other remarks which probably did not escape the attention of his Detroit listeners...
...I suppose I might have known that the slip about Crane and Stendahl was accidental...
...But I feel that, although exaggerated, it was nevertheless sincere...
...Straight's doctrinaire collectivism and by frequent lapses in style into mere schoolboy declamation...
...DRESSMAKERS AND INFLATION THE International Ladies' Garment Workers' * Union is as solidly behind the war, the President and all of his policies as any body of men and women in this country...
...Civil authorities and civilian ideals have always controlled...
...They strain to be highbrow and miss a really remarkable novel like „The Damnation Of Theron Ware" while whooping a piece of tripe like "You Can't Go Home Again...
...If the Axis forces amount to 14,000,000, it is calculated that with ten to eleven million Americans added to the British and Russian forces we shall have the necessary preponderance of power...
...Dennen's review of' Alfred Kazin's book, "On Native Grounds...
...Without explaining how he found out, he asserted that "they will want the same opportunities . . . that we have had...
...It is true that the estimate of the number of industrially employed persons necessary to the support of men under arms has steadily declined...
...Brace...
...As an executive of a great air transport company he probably understands a good deal about the business end of that part of the airplane business...
...NE need not for a moment minimize the tragedy of unemployment or the disgrace of poverty in the midst of plenty in order to recognize that there was no "widespread starvation" in the United States in 1932 or at any other time...
...The following two examples of naive immaturity are typical of much of the writing in the book : "Soviets in Russia...
...I appreciate the fact that your good paper recognizes the great significance of the Negro Movement by publishing such articles...
...There is a fable about a fellow who should have stuck to his last...
...After reading the book, however...
...If humor had only been one of the qualities of his precocity, the thinking in his book might have been more steady and coherent and consistent, and some of the absurdities of its attempted purple passages might have, been self-censored...
...The men in the fox holes are brothers and sons of men on the production lines...
...Make This the Last War (Harcourt...
...In an age ivps Vt ft vp hppn hliirVitpH V'b.UUl.l...
...LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Wm...
...But the flashes of keen intuition and clear reasoning are overbalanced, in this writer'l opinion, by Mr...
...ItlliinHtHiiunnniM: i iiniHiiijiijinii i nil...
...Perhaps some readers of The New Leader who are not so gun-shy in the matter of collectivism as this veteran resident of Soviet Russia, Nasi Germany and Japan, might see more light and hope in Mr...
...I -Another thing irritated me in reading Mr...
...Algernon Lew Extends Thanks to Friends From ALGERON LEE To the Editor: Please -let me use a little of your space to extend my thanks to the 800 friends who were at the dinner Sunday evening, and to the very many who, kept away by sickness, by travel difficulties or other causes, have reached me by letter, telegram, or phone call...
...It is natural to suppose that if these young men were returned to their old places they would do, after getting used to things, about as well as their fellow workers...
...Against this tendency the citizens and members of Congress must be on guard...
...it certainly seems poor taste, to use the mildest possible expression, to disparage the safeguards of the Bill of Rights...
...These figures were, of course, reached after consideration of the size of the forces of the Axis Allies and of the Allies fighting on our side...
...Since the OPA actually has not succeeded in imposing a ceiling on prices, the WLB has no right to proceed on the theory that this has been done...
...The ultimate decision, of course, must lie with Congress...
...I read it again about two years ago and was tremendously impressed with its quality...
...At any rate, it's a book worth reading, whether one finds it EDITORIAL COMMENT CAPTAIN RICKENBACKER ON PRODUCTIONN pAPTAIN EDWARD RICKENBAGKER has 7* the distinction of being a hero in two wars.- No one could detract from his glory...
...It is evident that a combined force of between ten and eleven millions will approach the limit which we can place in the field without crippling necessary industrial production...
...His recent desperate adventure on the Pacific, his return to the living after haviug been given up for dead, has specially endeared him to the heart of the nation...
...And if there is ever to be an era of enduring peace, the first condition—in my opinion—will be the willingness and the ability of the individual to say "No"' in no uncertain terms to the state...
...The right to strike is part of our free tradition...
...So the workers are caught between the failure of OPA on the one side and its success on the other...
...They could never think these new men so great if they had ever read any books...
...Perhaps it will help me, in what years of life may vet remain, to come a little nearer to deserving it all...
...It is important, therefore, that this matter should be publicly discussed...
...As for the others, those from the farms and offices and other industries, it would be a long time before they could be expected to hit the stride of the men who know their jobs...
...But it is doing a service to our distinguished hero to tell him in plain words that his recent remarks to the auto workers of Detroit were plain nonsense...
...But he partly surmounted this difficulty when, having made his hypocritical "non-intervention" agreement with the British government, he called on American business to refuse any sales to the Spanish Loyalist government...
...The everlasting emphasis on Hemingway is another symptom of" a weaknrnmminmniiininnrniiHnn'minnminifutMiiinuniniituininiiiiiuninni ness in the critical instrument...
...Such an attitude can be fateful...
...But about manufacturing it is evident that he knows nothing at all...
...PRAISES WAR PROFITS STORT From J. L. SITWELL To the Editor: The New Leader's scoop on the War Profits study by the OPA once again proves that your paper is up on its toes in finding and highlighting the real news of the day...
...He is sound in advocating an end of monopolistic imperialism, the recognition of the right of the more advanced colonial people* to self-government and the desirability of instituting some form of international control over regions which are not yet prepared to stand OB their own feet...
...I Still fail'So app/eciatc Kazin's-: original point, which to me is,' strained...
...Note...
...Straight regards with such supercilious contempt...
...Any effort to set up men under arms against the organized workers is fraught with danger...
...Rosalie Hotson...
...He said that out of the war will come "rugged individualists" and that "they will not accept regimentation or planned economy...
...How-anyone, in referring to the overwhelming col-lectivist age between the two catastrophic world wars, could refer to an overemphasis on individualism is beyond my comprehension...
...To prevent that kind of world, in my opinion, would almost be worth another war...
...Surely this in itself is a thrilling signal that we are on the right track at last...
...Some of them widely reprinted for no good purpose ran as follows: -' "Bring back the troops from the hell holes of tho world, place them in the factories, take the war workers and place them in the fox holes with filth, vermin, diarrhea, malaria and the Japanese, and I will guarantee you that production will be increased—and much of it doubled—within thirty days...
...Contrary to the.theory, there has been a slow but steady increase in the cost of most things which workers must buy...
...What these opportunities are he did not specify...
...I read it when it was published...
...in Europe and Russia, two-thirds of the people may be starving: two-thirds of the children may face death or lifelong disfigurement...
...Victory is a stern lover, her hair is disordered today, her face wild, her clothes torn...
Vol. 26 • January 1943 • No. 5
