The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM S.
A Page of Features Americana Books and Writers Chatter The Home Front By WILLIAM S. BOHN What and Why Is J. f. Matthews? MARTIN DIES is nothing but a loud-mouthed dim-wit from the pampas.^He,...
...s /¦^hallenire:—Several months ago two documents of the Italian ^* socialist underground were smuggled through to Allied centres...
...Of the first two, even those among us who were lawyers remembered little beyond what had been written down in our school history-books...
...A turftin the disputation brought in the Supreme Court, and before long we were naming the justices we would count as personages significant in the national tradition...
...My answer is the same as yours...
...Across the Seas:—Watch Hjalmar Schacht...
...All of these are good men...
...Ufashington Notes:—The news spread fast, and left more than the usual number of State Department critics aghast at what's going on...
...In reporting about conditions in Germany he promptly selected his own "Darlan" for the post-war period, none other than "Fats" Goering himself...
...DILYS BENNETT LAING...
...The paper rationing will be cutting down circulation of the big magazines—Time will cut a hundred thousand and level off at a million weekly copies...
...These were precisely the men—they and others like them—whom this J. B. person scorned for their conservatism, their respectability, their careful scholarship, their regard for facts and their lack of revolutionary spirit...
...By Oliver Gramling and AP foreign correspondents...
...It seems to^jne that interested guys are putting words into the mouths of those who are too busy fighting to speak lor themselves...
...It's factual and accurate, without explaining anything...
...It will come as no surprise that neither Beattie nor the men whose dispatches Gramling has compiled and edited belong in this category...
...Those whom they had tried to lead to the ultraradical jumping-off place they would denounce as criminals...
...But liberal protest is siowiy mounting...
...And because it was such, his political economy was postulated on laisses fairc, on "the competition of the market place" in things as well as ideas...
...The situation is clearly dangerous...
...Biddle's...
...In the past they would have showered Moscow-Trial epithets at all the anti-Stalinists involved in getting the DA...
...Where - they have always had their exhibit the WAACS now lift their flower-like faces in even W>ws up in Grand Central Palace...
...Stump and Waiter Enlist , WHEN I was a boy we had the theory that the first bluebird " would appear on Lincoln's birthday...
...Justice Holmes" is a skillful, delicate study, of a literary quality rare indeed among cabinet officers, and distinguished in any company 'Uf writers...
...In the backvof their minds is a picture of millions of new customers...
...But dropped it with a bang...
...Inside and Out By MATTHEW tOW I Tnfree as the Air:—That wasn't a mere blue pencil that got into Walter Winehell's and Drew Pearson's radio copy this week—it was a sharp censor's axe, and they've now got it suspended ever the heads of ail news commentators...
...But Lochner revealed himself even more fully after his release along with other correspondents from Bad Nauheim...
...Fellows who can outfly the Japs five to one may not be dumb in the head...
...His piece heavily loaded with phrases accounting Germany's might ended: "The population seemed to accept the fact of their defeat quite philosophically...
...The New Masses has finally got around to reviewing Alfred ILazin's widely-hailed On Native Grounds, and it's a typical Isidor Schneider hstchet-job: smooth and skulking, mean, narrow-minded, end foul-hitting...
...Tresca's must be the last political murder...
...Crowell...
...The question he put icas: Would the American administration hare tke same objections to Goering at the head of the German government that it has to Hitler...
...who as dictator of Germany's four-year plan for self-sufficiency, has more concrete ideas about the question (i.e...
...Nearly half of this inspiring manual is devoted beans and beets and asparagus and so on down or up to spinach...
...They had had analogous conflicts with their respective overwhelming fathers, which James overcame, which Holmes carried to his grave...
...what the New Order will be like) than anybody else...
...The 'Glamorous' Press By ROBERT 6. SMACK FREELY TO PASS...
...The places of the roses and chrysanthemums and all the -other blooms have been taken by men in the uniform brown of the United States Army...
...As introduction to Holmes' philosophy there does not exist today a better workjthan Mr...
...Justice Holmes during his tenth year on the bench, to give body to the image...
...But, is that all...
...Where the foreigners will get money or credit doesn't trouble them much...
...Well, what is J. B. Matthews doing now...
...They live in the land where you can see farther than anywhere else on earth...
...2, 1941, Lochner wrote a piece attempting to define the New Order...
...Daimey also attacked the "bunk" and "balderdash" of his anti-labor views...
...The Digest's current circulation has been topping the 9-million mark...
...and another "the sort of drivel that is almost enough to make one despair...
...I regard it as a solemn obligation always to interpret the news to the American public impartially and fairly," he said at that time...
...or buy your children milk, Joy's not for yon...
...Intention is to leave fiction in studio control, while developing the medium of fact-films along special lines as a public-opinion moulder in the post-war reconstruction period and after...
...Said Virginius Dabney...
...372 pp...
...On one occasion, to my knowledge, an American in Berlin wax visited by a man claiming to represent Goering...
...Yet each was aware, to his innermost, that existence was a struggle of forces or wills in which ideas were tools and weapons...
...Pearson was charging that Nye and Wheeler were the factors behind the mess being made of the trial of the 33 conspirators: he also was to say that Wilskie was writing a book which in part would sock the State Department for "selling democracy short," and that Bearde-3ey Ruml (author of the skip-a-year-tax plan, exposed in these pages recently) was "an innocent instrument" of the war wealthy...
...is picking up and the social health of the tewn safeguarded— now that the Times-Dispatch Has dropped Westbrook Pegler's column...
...It's certainly something the whole labor movement ought to be on guard against...
...but it is reported that Sam has wired Moscow—he wants to get the movie rights to Leo Tolstoi's next novel...
...Here in The New Leader office we entertain many a queer bird from one week's end to another...
...Before Pearl Harbor we always got chummy with the Stump and Walter men at the Flower Show...
...It is a compilation of correspondents' accounts of the incidents that have made up the present war from September, 1939...
...Charlie Lindbergh was closeted for three hours this week with Wheeler and Reynolds...
...He has never broken off his connection with the former ruling families of Germany...
...It should stimulate them to seek out for themselves, in his own utterances, the authentic singularity of Oliver Holmes' spirit...
...Foreign Policy Reports we get a quick view inside the heads of the citizens of the eight Rocky Mountain states...
...Kazin pulled no punches in his chapter on literary Stalinism, but fought cleanly and intelligently...
...Right now 85 per cent of the people are "convinced that the United States should try to form some kind of union of the Allied countries to help keep peace and order in the world following the defeat of our enemy...
...I have my memories...
...Readers Digest will drop thirty pages and a million newstand copies...
...They were John Marshall, Roger Taney, Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes...
...pi°t and Counter-Plot:—The Treses case is a month old...
...It makes one think of fellows who hovered round in the shadows of the struggle in Czarist Russia...
...Now that man sits there in Washington drawjng down ?7,500.0O a year which comes out of our good tax money...
...Thinking In the Rockies DEPORTS on how soldiers think in all of their occupations, ** climates and elements are—so far as I am concerned—completely inconclusive...
...Because Carlo a Prato, ex-chief of the Oveassas broadcasting division of OWI had charged that the document was a "fake...
...Iy39...
...He uses hundreds of thousands of dollars to harass citizens of this country...
...JVew York: Charles Scribners' Sans...
...The Sitae Network prohibits all brick-tossing, will net allow "deresjfctory references" of any kind to public officials, from FDR and Hull, to Dies end Wheeler...
...None but the reddest of the red was radical enough for him...
...and it led on the whole to liberal decisions in cases involving trades unions and trusts, and other issues of economic freedom for the common man...
...He was...
...Farrar & Rinehart...
...But there was never much isolationism est there in the neighborhood of Pike's Peak...
...Montana offered to go before any committee of the Socialist Party or the Social Democratic Federation...
...James was, in Mr...
...Alexander Korea will do it in London, with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh starring...
...Finally, after some pressure, sections of the Civil Disobedience Manifesto were used, but without mention of the Italian Socialist party...
...But any old gardner, will confess that the new realism is not bereft of romance...
...I am willing to bet that if I could be footloose next Friday in the right parts of New Jersey or Delaware I could form the reception committee for at least one tiny press-agent of spring...
...War has its i effects on literature...
...But the dossier reveals—that in 1934 he offered (in an interview with the Petxt Journal) to become Mussolini's Viceroy in Italy, and spoke of Italian Fascism enthusiastically...
...Once in a while he was shocked or angered by some turn of events...
...But an examination of his method shows that he builds up an impressive picture of the complete harmony of purpose that seems to motivate all Nazi leaders...
...Answer that yourself...
...1942...
...The man he draws was a brave and witty gentleman, a philosophical * humanist tough yet noble, for the principles and practices of whose faith David Hume might have supplied a precedent—skeptical toward doctrines, conservative toward discipline, therefore naively laissez faire in economic theory and Malthusian in economic practice, and in his spirit ever divided by "the dualism of the skeptic and the moralist, of the doubter and the preacher...
...One recent column he called "the most depressing exhibition of nonsense in recent years...
...In local broadcast circles a heated squabble is already on...
...Dies delivered on February 1, Mr...
...Bankers, whose position had promised international help, are losing out (particularly because of the loss of their business bases on the coast) and party bosses of the Kuomir.tang, like the Chen brothers, are moving in...
...Jean Patou knows this, and so did Keats...
...Habsburg is off again, for this week in New York...
...By Edward W. Beatitc...
...Last time out he spoke for 12 days on legal aspects...
...They had, out of these experiences, matured a tough-minded affirmation of experience and skepticism of dogma, in which faith also counted as a telling experience...
...Of it he wrote: "This daily enjoys the special protection of Hermann Goering...
...THE act of faith, in James' words, is an act * of will, a choice between alternatives of direction and form whose outcome is not guaranteed in advance, ¦ whose proof is in its consequences or nowhere at all...
...Even though the Justice's view of distribution is one not many liberals share, his belief that our economic philosophy is better postulated upon ideas of consumption than ideas of ownership is one that I am pretty sure will preoccupy the next generation...
...He has since been challenged by Vanru Montana (secretary of the Italian Socialist Federation) for proof of the charges, and Montana has offered to show evidence of authenticity...
...But it contributes no more to popular understanding than if Grantland Rice had edited it...
...It's the Stump and Walter Seed Annual for 1943...
...Getting in on the ground floor in Africa may be the way to Paris power...
...Felix Morrow, editor of The Militant, the Trotskyite weekly, has aakeo anxiously—"Is the GPU Planning a New Murder Drive Against Us...
...There were dozens of Others, but I mention only a few who are among my friends, men whom I have known for5 many years...
...I smelled something phoney...
...Literati:—J...
...It is valuable as a compact chronological account of the way things have gone...
...His section on England under the blitz is good, but all the rest of recent history is for him just one big romp...
...If a man suddenly jumps from the extreme red and irrational left to a fat job in the blackest corner of the right, what does a fellow naturally think of him...
...The faith is the twin of the skepticism, and both are testimony to freedom as the first and last thing of the human enterprise...
...MARTIN DIES is nothing but a loud-mouthed dim-wit from the pampas.^He, too, is a bureaucrat with a vested interest and he has his bureau, run by a man named J. B. Matthews...
...As many years later he wrote to his Chinese admirer Wu: "To sum it all there must be faith in effort, before you can see the goal or put articulately the question to be asked...
...It ia true, according to Professor Cherrington's report, that there are limits to this devotion to internationalism...
...The proof comes later, or may never come...
...My notion is that we should put the argument for internationalism on a tough, realistic basis...
...who is a current target of the Commies...
...But interpretation of the thoughts of folks at home is done by experts, and now and then we get extremely illuminating flashes...
...Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism...
...They have worked for trade unions...
...It was the faith in freedom that kept Holmes skeptical and the skeptic in him that kept Holmes from failing into pessimism...
...All right...
...Their sentiments are genuinely human...
...The citizens want independence for India and a better life for the people of China...
...Justice Holmes and William James By HORACE M. KALLEN MR...
...Italics mine.—R.G.S...
...The disreputable informers of those days were always the loudest-shouting extremists...
...Len de Caux pulled another party-line stunt by completely omitting from.hi= CIO convention booklet all reports of CIO war relief undi i Mourn Sweetland...
...I am not speaking of a few top-notchers like Edgar Ansel Mowrer, G. E. R. Gedge, Howard Smith or five or six others whose names promptly come to mind...
...Leo Tolstoi's War and Peace is headed for film production...
...Biddle thanks for bringing, from his place, in these times, the image of the great liberty-loving Justice thus back to our minds...
...But Gramling's book serves one good purpose unintentionally...
...But a Prato has been silent...
...The average man out there, high up in the thin, clear air, "favors policies that would build up the standard of living in India, China and other economically retarded areas . . . but with the definite understanding that this does not mean letting in goods that compete with Rocky Mountain •products...
...ONE night, not long ago, I was a guest at a party where the friendly talk was tall and differences of opinion were sharp...
...By Francis Biddle...
...He reports Gasset safe and well in Lisbon, where he's giving lectures at the university...
...Included were: Dr...
...Maybe we can knock loose a few inherited fallacies...
...It is because of Pegler's misrepresentations that we have ceased to carry his articles...
...Lochner does not put any quotes about the word defection...
...Beattie's book is written somewhat in the Richard Haliburton tradition...
...Biddle remembers his chief with a strong and affectionate piety, but expresses his memories with a reserve which leads the reader to feel that he knows more than he tells...
...And the spring announcement of Messers Stump and Walter has also changed with the times...
...Lochner during the last war was secretary to Henry Ford in his curious peace shin mission...
...His "Mr...
...But, if the Justic does not come alive through the Attorney-General's pen, something of his tang and flavor does filter through, significantly and beautifully...
...The reshuffles in the Chinese government are said to be ehifts to the right and isolationism...
...For high and dangerous action teaches us to believe as right beyond dispute things for which our doubting minds are slow to find words of proof...
...I am not citing documents...
...3.50...
...This year," say Stump and Walter, "the accent is on growing food...
...James affirmed the will-to-believe and the right to believe at one's own risk, and, being surer of science than of religion, became "harsh toward the dogmatisms of science and tender toward the dogmatisms of religion...
...Each was, in consequence, basically a skeptic...
...To the youth of this, who will be the men in power then, the study and pondering of Holmes' fajth and insight could provide an apt discipline in the art of liberty...
...JUSTICE HOLMES...
...If therojare any phsyiocrats among us, let them figure out why folks on the high plains and mountainsides should have more sense than the rest of us...
...One strange item is called to our attention, however—that in all this time the Commie press has not made a single reference to the Trotskyites...
...Biddle implies that it was good health, but there are too many instances proving the opposite...
...I don't need any...
...It is relayed to us by Ben M. Cherrington, of the University of Denver, and is based on the work of the National Opinion Research Center of the University...
...He smelled of the provocateur...
...And only those who sleep in silken sheets have money enough to pay what Joy is worth...
...But the feathered tribe is represented only by an occasional sparrow which timidly peeks in the window and then flits away to more tempting scenery about the Y.W.C.A...
...Holmes stayed harsh toward all dogmatism...
...Schmidt, chief of the Press Department of the Berlin Foreign Office, was saying "The superiority of the German command has completely frustrated the Soviets—the German Army will, with the start of the warmer season, attack and destroy the remaining Soviet armies—one thing is certain : the Russian army will no longer exist in the summer of 1942...
...Each had confronted the ultimate foe in a personal struggle, when simply not to yield is victory—James in his lonely sickroom, Holmes on the field of battle...
...it was said, "too liberal" to "deal tactfully" with Vichyite officials...
...he has lost a customer...
...In the January 15 number of...
...Pessimism, like optimism, points to the foregone conclusions of a closed world that Reason with a capital R could reach...
...Biddle's own story of Holmes...
...Morrow feels that the almost unworldly abstinence from anti-Trotskyism may be the preparation for new GPU attempts...
...There is considerable bitterness over the eye-dropper Allied aid...
...Furthermore, Goering is an officer from imperialist days...
...FREE MEN ARM-FIGHTING...
...Liberals owe Mr...
...Warder Norton, the publisher, has denied the reports that Jose Ortega y Gasset (famed author of the Revolt of the Masses) is a prisoner of the Nazis in Germany...
...They read much the same books and thought the same way...
...They feel that old-line imperialism is played out...
...Keep an eye open for the old America Firsters...
...In so far as the sentiment of that company was contributing to the formation of the American legend, it was forming Holmes into a figure peculiarly the prophet of freedom...
...This leads up to my favorite topic, and I wish I could have a talk about it with some of the folks out there...
...Donald Adams, long-time Book Review editor, has left the New York Times...
...and there *• is still nothing new...
...On May 3, 1941, Lochner was with the Nazi army as it occupied Athens...
...He makes world history revolve around his passport and how it grew and grew and grew, from 32 pages to 92 pages...
...It's a pretty low-down occupation...
...The student of propaganda will promptly recognize Lochner's craftiness...
...Not so many years ago this man hung around Union Square, about the Communist outfits, about outposts of the "revolutionary" fronts...
...Other publications will skip issues, cut down margins, etc...
...But more than once I did see him—and hear him —bravely singing in the thin winter sunshine...
...They have published scholarly studies of ecenomic and social problems...
...On Sept...
...one of the best correspondents of our time, the first American expelled by Hitler, was going to North Africa on official government business—and was stopped cold...
...For now and then he would invade the Rand School...
...editor, and ene of the Souths foremost liberals: 'As a commentator on international affairs, he comes dose to winning the diamond-studded belt as the champion palooka of all time...
...No comes Mr...
...He tells with skill, rather than with power, and the total effect strikes me as too external...
...It happens that some two or three billion dollars in French assets will become subject to the control of the French Government that is finally set up in France...
...Lochner concludes, "is all that the trained observer of German politics can say to inquiring compatriots...
...He has not only lost our confidence...
...But the fact is that there have not been a dozen first-class politically-awakened correspondents in Europe during this entire period...
...They have spent their time and energies trying to bring about reforms, to make things better, to improve life in the gradual, democratic, American way...
...Here are the examples, written either by himself or his staff and passed by him: During the invasion of Holland Lynn Heinzer-ling wrote "The Dutch seemed to be taking the occupation philosophically...
...Newest move on the propaganda front is for the Government to take ail education and information films oat of Hollywood hands...
...Beauty has given way to strength, perfume to power...
...We simply can't wait for the next round...
...A convincing case could probably be made out for the notion that a large part of present national confusion and lack of fighting anti-fascist ardor is the responsibility of the men who covered abroad the fateful events of the last ^twenty years...
...I was always suspicious of the man...
...The excisions in the Winchell broadcast were similar...
...Reaction everywhere te gleeful this week (in Congress the cry was for Winehell's court-martial...
...Only four were named by everybody...
...Parfum de Patou (AdverrisemeiiT) Joy is the costliest perfume on the earth...
...Otto will sound a call for the return of Italian-held Tyrol to Austria...
...Now only silence...
...And this was truer of Holmes than of Brandeis...
...Only an open world, where alternatives are real, could generate both doubt and competing faiths claiming to replace doubt by certainty...
...Vugiuia...
...So the palooka has been dropped for the count...
...Those people are "bitterly opposed to having another war...
...Francis Biddle, the current attorney general of the United States, sometime solicitor general, judge of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, novelist and secretary to Mr...
...General opinion among those who have watched Goering," Lochner writes, "is that he is by no means wedded to the Nazi faith in the bigoted sort of way that Goebbels professes to be and that Hess truly was—until his defection...
...With bulging self-conceit he smirked down on everyone who believed in American democracy and was content to go ahead a step at a time...
...The differences were ovi" |.,wi<-\ — Adams kept to a literary tack, while the paper has be a pu^hiiuj war books...
...The monarchists held e secret meeting...
...Beattie and Gramling...
...The people out there want to protect- their young men against a future war, but they also want to protect their beef and minerals against foreign competition...
...Biddle's quotations from "Holmes, he has not brought out and may have missed...
...Sen...
...He was much too brave and daring and imaginative to fool round with such bourgeois-minded trash...
...Biddle's echo of Holmes' phrase, searching for magic," while Holmes to James was ever vindicating mere vital excitement as the be-all and end-all of our existence...
...Bilbo is gargling his throat in preparation for another filibuster, tor the news is that Pepper will reintroduce the anti-poll tax bill...
...He would be satisfied with nothing more than a complete overturn of our society...
...488 pp...
...He refers to the S'ational-Zeitring...
...Assuming that the National-Zeitung reflects his views...
...Each was conscious of the abundance, the variety and the parity of alternatives, in ideas and events...
...Better than anything that has come out in a long-time it gives an interesting picture of the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press, headed by Louis P. Lochner...
...I had a feeling that he was insincere, that he had no real interest in the working class or in anyone else but himself...
...The other arrived in New York—>bufr the OWI failed to use it in its short-wave work...
...A casual reading gives the impression, of complete objectivity...
...beyond the courtyard...
...Such was Holmes' world...
...Most of what we knew of the last two concerned their opinions about liberty...
...Bob Van Gelder will take over for the ume l>eing...
...He uses the word "assuming" as if there might be some doubt that Goering's paper reflects Goering's views, indeed as if there might be some freedom of the press inside Germany...
...Surely they could see a point which is right before their noses...
...Sam Goldwyn was just edged out...
...Somebody will be dropped in his tracks—and a still, small voice from 13th Street will be heard to say: "Just another internal squabble...
...In his spiritual history, the Justice belongs with William James...
...Edgar Ansel Mowrer...
...In youth they were intimate friends...
...After that ill-fated event and the wars end he spent most of his time abroad, winning the Pulitzer prize for distinguished reporting ir...
...Let's strike while the fear of war is hot...
...No less than three-quarters of the people favor either the total exclusion of foreign beef, sugar and wool, or would place quotas and taxes upon such products...
...The inward essence of this, though it is implicit in Mr...
...Matthews publicized a list of government employes...
...Why he picked that day, I wouln't know...
...They want to sell, but are not enthusiastic about buying...
...If you can't pay your rent when it is due...
...to check all trails, including those which might lead to the GPU...
...The voice is Martin's, but the phonograph-winder is J. B. Now who and what and why is this J. B...
...One arrived in London and was widely rebroadcast back to the Italian people...
...Italics mine.—R.G.S...
...T*HIS is not quite the image shaped in my mind * by what I know and have read or by what I have learned from Mr...
...They want Russia and Britain to pay for what they receive under Lend-Lease, but they don't want imports from those countries—or, apparently, from any countries...
...I seriously advise all and sundry to send the boys all the aims and rations they can use and lay off this business of trying to supply them with cast-off ideas...
...But on the whole his assignment for UP was just one bit of excitement after another, with some good anecdotes thrown in...
...If they insist on high tariffs, they will have another war...
...Tke hne hag been pretty clearly drawn...
...if the going got any tougher he would have gone on to recipes (like Huey Long* and tell the Senate how to make south-Mississippi syrup...
...There are a half-dozen other cases like Mowrer's around being hushed up...
...There are many keys to the mystery of French politics, but we follow the principle—chcrchez le (rave...
...DERHAPS it's too much to hope for, but I think * the American public ought to be spared any more books about pre-war Europe by foreign correspondents with the publication of the works of Messrs...
...But at this point their ways parted...
...Once safely seated where they could pull down the profit from their treason, their friends were always the first to be betrayed...
...Gramling's book is different...
...It is the force of will, the capacity to want something fiercely, to stick to the rugged course...
...David Saposs, Paul Porter, Paul E. Brissenden, John Herling...
...And whom does he select for attack ? In the horrendous harangueHvhich Mr...
...Holmes, who held that "to have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man," also declared "in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, and that is that faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use...
...Watch Goering...
...But one harbinger of the advancing season, gorgeous, practically lurid with color, illuminates the whole place from the cluttered mountain of my desk...
...He always has remained a monarchist at heart...
...Whenever he did it was to pour scorn on the trade unionists, the socialists, the "reformers...
...And nothing infuriates the Schneiders and Mike Gees so ssueh as straight-shooting...
...The number one ^* German economist may soon pop into the headlines as the Nazi peace emissary...
...A year ago, Dr...
...The cover of their 1943 masterpiece is adorned with cabbages, cauliflower and carrots- instead of the alluring buds and blooms of former times of peace...
...Deft & Old Sewery:—Garbage distribution in Richmond...
Vol. 26 • February 1943 • No. 7
