The Passing of "The Thurman Arnold Era," or Trust-Busting Dies Again
MUNRO, DAVID A.
The Passing of "The Thurman Arnold Era," or Trust-Busting Dies Again By DAVID A. MUNRO MANY thought the Era of Thurman Arnold, now drawing; to a dose, was an anachronism. Others, among the ranks...
...It seems a simple concept, but its application to the Culbertson bridge enterprises, the advertising business, the movies, the philosophy of history, the definition of revolution, and the all-important problem of Dictatorship versus Democracy, forms as exciting and illuminating a little intellectual excursus, or prospectus for a treatise, as can be found in print...
...He could not be humble enough...
...So at least he believed...
...He decided to adopt for a certain period the attitude and behavior of a person who feels generously friendly toward the weak and poor...
...He had just placed twenty francs against the bank when a big man in the crowd around the table stepped viciously on his foot...
...The good life is a harmonious balance of them all...
...Restricted production, high cost, and low turnover become the order of the day...
...This volume, like the others in the series, is characterized by an extraordinary freshness, a vigor, a g^rand sweep which views American1 experience, hoi in fragments, but as a totality, with emphasis on relationships of the parts, to the whole...
...and they have not been afraid to make comments, judgments, and interpretations of their own...
...But the American spirit has believed in the possibility of effective choices, of the reconciliation of opposing forces by reason and adjustment rather than by force and violence...
...And what with cards and alcohol, and his mother's halo shedding its pale light around him in his sleep, he developed the inevitable anxiety neurosis...
...A Culbertson Dissipating System was the next invention of this ideal-or-demon-driven mind...
...The Beards and America By MERLE CURT...
...The outcome of this was nowhere near so definite and effective as the dissolution forced on Standard Oil in 1911...
...IN the pages which develop this conception of * American civilization one will find penetrating and original analyses of the thought of a great number of men and women, European and American, liberal and conservative and radical, well-known and relatively obscure...
...He has taught through example, as well as through writing, a wide public, for he hasbeen no cloistered scholar...
...And it was based on the most modern findings of psychology...
...The main note in the idea of civilization in America* was, in the Beards' own words, the belief : "that American civilization was founded in the modern age by certain types of immigrants, had a unique history, was stamped by national characteristics differentiating it ineradically from European civilizations as well as Oriental civilizations, and had a destiny and obligations of its own to fulfill...
...And her inflexible heart was set on having a steady and cozy life-companion and a home...
...Its immense theoretical and practical importance grows upon you as you read...
...While Europe was bleeding on the battlefields, this once consecrated Leader of the Masses devoted his entire genius to devising ways of tricking nature itno giving him less pain and more pleasure than she had intended to give...
...The volume has, like its predecessors, the grand style...
...Philos-{ ophized Arnold—"I guess I'm like the | Marx Brothers—they can be awfully funny { for a long while, but finally people get I tired of them...
...The Beards in the first instance use the semantic approach to the problem and find that the idea of civilization emerged as an idea in England and France in the middle part of the eighteenth century, an . idea characterized especially by its dynamic quality, its basic conception of growth, development, improvement...
...With their old magic touch the Beards have woven together in an integrated and moving whole all these quotations...
...had pyramided and broken the bank...
...But the Madison trials were hardly more thai curtain-raisers...
...Men in control of little or big privileges have not wanted to see production increased in such a way as to endanger these privileges...
...What, then, is the idea of civilization as it has developed in America...
...It is now fifteea years since the first two volumes appeared, and three years since the further volume, dealing with the depression years and impending war, was issued from the press...
...But few called Arnold what he called himself—"a traffic cop...
...old problem of historical inquiry — the spirit of his own time and world...
...The American spirit has not been blind to storms, to the obstacles which have stood in the way of the realization of a creative and socialized intelligence working for the broadest possible realization of human and ethical and esthetic .values...
...It is not because luck runs oBt Good luck and bad, if you give them time enough, are constant factors...
...Instead of a System of Ethics and Mass Psychology, he startled the world with a System for Playing Bridge...
...Theories of economics sprout in the corridors of Washington profusely.' Arnold himself has been guilty of nurturing a few...
...The book must be read, pondered, re-read...
...It was just after rising from the living dead with this deep wisdom on his lips, and while working it into his magnum opus in the New w York Public Library, that this detachable fanatie got switched again, as I have related, to the card table...
...From 52.7 per cent of the oil production in the hands of the majors at the first of, 193S ihe per cent rose to 70 the first of 1942 and has now approached to an undetermined point even closer to wo per cent...
...Our cartel structure has weakened us spiritually by introducing an alien philosophy which leads us to distrust our own economic traditions...
...The threat of an Arnold wall-ing the beat turned many a businessmen's attention back to frank competition for the...
...David Munro offers some highlights | on the tired Trust-Buster in Washington, | who has now been "kicked upstairs" to ! a quiet Federal Court Judge's chamber...
...Beard, too, has shared in both the condemnation and the honors, both as a collaborator and as a person and author in her own right...
...And you will not be surprised that his thoughts gave birth to a System of Ethics...
...It is the group leader who organizes a bridge game, selects a brand of cigarettes, decides that Roosevelt is a hero or a monster, throws rice and old shoes at the newlyweds, or lynches a Negro...
...G9^J>ages...
...When Culbertson came back, victorious but gory, he found that his twenty francs, left where he had placed it...
...Years later many criticized with considerable venom Dr...
...An altercation ensued, which moved rapidly from an exchange of insults, through a challenge to a duel, to a fist fight he the street outside the building...
...They have endeavored to round off the series, The Rise of Afnertcttn' Civilization, by relating to the more outward aspects of civilization in the United...
...It has weakened us materially by making at afraid of full production because it creates surpluses which cannot be distributed after tba war...
...Ilya," he had replied: "So am I. Father...
...it regards language, ideas, knowledge, institutions, property as social products to be used to effect the largest possible development of all individuals...
...They leave to theh-leader the task of making decisions, and even the emotional function of becoming cruel or loving, heroic or cowardly...
...Memorable indeed are the passages on Lydia Maria Child, the great apostle of the freedom of the slave, on Lucretia Mott, far-seeing proponent of the creative and humane in civilization, of Henry George, of Ralph Waldo Emerson, of George D. Herron, of Alfred Thayer Mahan, of dozens of others...
...It is to the nation's great detriment that the protection of these privileges—which run all the way from a workers' "investment" in an outworn production or construction technique, to the "Pittsburgh plus" in steel prices—is put ahead of the nation's interest...
...I refer you to his memoirs for the innumerable excitements of the story, but it is no idle boast when he says in conclusion: "By the Spring of 1934 I had completed a world-wide organization that far surpassed the combined publicity set-ups of a great motion picture star, a radio idol, a , famous writer, a captain of industry, and a champion prizefighter...
...WHAT is the American "spirit...
...It was a system for returning to his lost love for mankind...
...He expresses it this way: A man is a corporation composed of several different personalities: sensualist, idealist, child, family man, business manager, philosopher...
...The trouble with my life," he confided to m one late evening when we had both been deprecating the celebrated joys of reminiscenet, "is that my ideals for myself were too'gTawBBns...
...Beard has written with force and clarity on the history of the American labor movement and in innumerable articles, books, and speeches has called attention to the importance of American women in the building of American civilization...
...He had shown his temper some time before when to a telegram reading: "Am broke...
...And then it sickens him—he denounces snobbery with nil whole soul, and dreams of walking out, liks Tolstoy, even from his own comparatively modest home and fortune...
...Once more, and again politely, he was escorted to the border, and invited not to come back...
...the exceptions...
...He began to sleep again dreamlessly, and get up in the morning instead of the afternoon, and Care what was happening outside of his own nervous system...
...Undoubtedly the biggest single job undertaken by the Anti-Trust Division was the attack upon the Oil Monopoly...
...he appropriate to call to mind the equipment of the Beards for this great task of dealing with "the intellectual and moral qualities that Americans deemed necessary to civilization in the United States...
...INTERVENING between these moods of cocky * complacence and martyrous remorse, there to a cooler Culbertson who gives to his deficiency the rather tolerant name of "perfectionism...
...After experimenting," he says, "I reached a sort of unstable equilibrium based on (a) the minimum state of drunkenness necessary to dissolve my fits of anxiety, (b) the period of sobriety or semi-sobriety necessary to win enough money to stay afloat financially, and (c) the minimum periods of rest and recreation necessary to keep going physically...
...The problems involved in writing it must have been enormous...
...There is aa enormous sheaf of papers in my files, short stories, novels, sociological treatises, psychological sketches, essays on gambling, a play and » mystery story that I've actually sold, even • few poems in French—all unfinished...
...The American Spirit"—and in the following' article Merle Curti, himself one of the nation's leading historians, analyzes ~j and estimates Hs contribution to our cultural life and national self-awareness...
...1 am compelled by circumstantial evidence to believe that Culbertson's Bridge System is as good, at least, as any other...
...He became a super-sophisticate, a master of degeneration, the greatest—or at least the most delicately balanced—wastrel on earth...
...And from his professor's chair at New Haven he hit out for Wash-| ington to move into the Anti-Trust Divi-| sion—to ride herd on the monopolies, as : someone cracked, like a paunchy cowboy, j But his bureau he ran like a law office, i crowded with sticklers for case precedents...
...He has, as a Connecticut dairy' farmer, taught milk producers the value of organization...
...All those years of study and meditation on mass psychology, instead of bringing new-light to Socialism, new and more scientific guidance to the bewildered Religion of Humanity, illumined the advertising business with one of the greatest feats of publicity ever performed...
...All those who wanted to freeze the stratification of social function and social deference in state quo, even though this would mean a kind of'feudal America, were outraged by Arnold...
...He himself is aware of the deficiency as well as the gifts...
...It spread rapidly after 1770 in the American colonies and was a basic concept in the thought of the leaders of the American Revolution...
...Bat when the fall story of American business will be told...
...and several others have gone into the business...
...What, then, was the idea of civilization as Americans from every class and region used the term...
...He did it of course by playing cards...
...I had such sublime notions of what I ought t» do that I never could do anything...
...He wrote to Faustina, saying with sadness that he could never see her again...
...vf>.r .¦ -.¦ • * * INEVITABLY Charles A. Beard has been bit-* terfy criticized and widely applauded both for his Writing and his deeds...
...Her flexible mind was .mainly occupied with bridge...
...It is hard to perceive why the birth of a daughter should have had this effect even on so easily detached a fanatic...
...Arnold was really gunning for some of the big rackets in the oil business...
...He recognizes the change in the bitter preface he wrote for a book by a member of his staff—Joseph Borkin's Germany's Master Plan...
...Civilization in the United States...
...But in spite of these paradoxes and contradictions one meaning transcended all others-—providing, so to speak, the main motif in the symphony, a motif which became all the more pronounced and unmistakable by reason of the minor notes of dissidence...
...And that was important, for Culbertson is a heartwhole feminist—the last man in the world to fall in love with a vacuum cleaner...
...The cure was made easy by a streak of luck at baccarat...
...DL'T the Arnold era, flourishing since early 1939, has been in general more notable for its publicity than for its accomplishments...
...With the help of these devices the monopoly steamroller has spread ruin through independent retailers and producers...
...For having dared to show some of the material forces back of the framing and adoption of the Constitution he was denounced as an "irrevent," "muckraking," "subversive radical...
...the qualifications...
...Out from a Rocky Mountain homestead (he was Mayor of Laramie, Wyo...
...It juas a da*, feat for Arnold, but the record is one of magnificent failure in the fight for people's right*.' Elsewhere the little victories have stuaaai the path of the Anti-Trust Division...
...Therefore Ilya had to finance his own adventures in decadence...
...But when he brings the so-called "criminals" to book before the bar of the Department of Justice, he regularly gives them his traffic cop analogy...
...No—it had to be a sudden and complete science, a discoveiy by Ely Culbertson of no less a thing than "The Structure of the Mass Mind...
...Thurman Arnold had written in The Folklore of Capitalism—the book which got him his job— that the activity carried on in Washington was the country's "spiritual government?' only, and that the "temporal government" was wielded by the business corporations which direct American lives in all important matters bearing upon a man and his livelihood...
...It is an integral part of The Rise of the American Civilization and a necessary part of the Beards' great life work...
...Rubber has been rescued from control by Standard Ofl Company (New Jersey...
...it excludes pessimism about the world as the inevitable home of misery...
...What runs out is moral* —the poise and self-discipline required to kesp up a perfectly rational attitude toward an enterprise so vital yet so largely based on chance^ "No one knows better than I," he says, "danger of moral degeneration threatening tlnn% who try, however honestly, to make a living **",• cards...
...The Beards " admit that this is an imponderable, and that like all imponderables, it is elusive...
...He did not draw the pious moral that salvation comes by selling all you have and giving to the poor, that he who would save his life must lose it...
...that love of the neighbor is the sole law of life...
...He believes that women arc "at least as intelligent as men," and likes to have them earn their share of the living and play their part in the world outside the home...
...It is the first book of its kind...
...I can't do it because I think it has to be perfect...
...Others, among the ranks of injured Big Businessmen, thought it was a manifestation of New Deal witch-hunting...
...The text is abundantly documented by lengthy quotations from these materials...
...All the "integrated" companies had to do to kill competition was to cut down all profit in the field Where the independent was competing...
...She was interested neither in vagrancy nor revolution—whichever of these stars it was that ruled her husband's early life...
...As a devotee of the only known system for not playing bridge—namely, not to know how—I approach this chapter of his multicaloSW life with some constraint...
...a friend detailing the progress of the experiment were opened...
...She matched him also with a magnificent brain...
...No one of these members must be permitted to run away with the whole corporation...
...Josephine Dillon Culbertson, the third woman who swerved the course of this gifted prodigal's life, possessed like Nadya and his mother both beauty and force of character...
...It is a sad as well as fantastic story, the story of a man of great gifts and a great deficiency...
...His father was not Interested in this kind of greatness...
...His attention was called by the authorities to the White Slave law...
...You will not be surprised that within two days he had devised a System for Polishing Spitoons, which left him a nicely calculated interval for lying in his bunk thinking about what he had been through...
...But Culbertson's System for Promoting a Bridge System and Its Inventor is so much better than any other that the reading public has had no honest chance to choose...
...It thus resembles in some respects a 'great primary source collection: but it is far more than that...
...A Study of the •Idea of...
...The Culbertson System girdled the world...
...We must, if we are to fight this wn with enthusiasm for our own way of life, destroy both the philosophy and the private power of domestic and international cartels over foreign and domestic economic policy...
...man Arnold carried a big stickler...
...Over 175,000 copies of the first volumes of The Rise were sold...
...they have no narrow, doctrinaire conception of it...
...Unlike .trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt, Thur...
...The Culbertson Story — From Revolution To Bridge to the Geo-Psychology of Peace ii IN peace time the Culbertson Pursuit System *¦ might have worked all right, but the presence in Turin of a man with an American passport and a Russian accent aroused the suspicions of the police...
...LYING awake in bed that night, he decided to insert a thoughtful and sympathetic giv-ing-away of that forty thousand francs into the place in his daily regime which had been occupied by alcoholic indulgence...
...it has humor, wit, irony, it has poetry and resounding cadences, it has, above all, clarity and strength...
...Culbertson conceives a crowd somewhat on the analogy of living tissue, as a collection of groups or cells, each consisting of at "passive anonymous mass" and a "nucleus"—the leader...
...it emphasizes human dignity and human worth, the sharing of all values and experiences deemed good by those possessing them...
...after year* of Big Busi-j ness pressure, fallen, the last of the New I Deal brain-trnsters to bite the dust...
...A good many Labor leaders frankly thought that the Anti-trust Division under Arnold was a device of the reactionary elements in the Administration for curbing organized labor...
...States—-government, politics, economics, institutions, letters, arts, and science, for example— "the intellectual and moral qualities that Americans have deemed necessary to civilization in the United States...
...So does the reason why the author could not write the treatise...
...He decided once more and very firmly to write an epoch-making work on Mass Psychology...
...he came to the faculty of the Yale Law School...
...Tungsten carbide, the cutting tool metal, has been removed from the inexcusable restrictions imposed upon it by General Electric...
...What have the Beards tried to do in this last ottbjeir:books, The American Spirit...
...AND a mad fantastical adventure it was...
...He told Bill Hutchesen he had snarled up building...
...Before considering The American Spirit it may...
...He uses the same language to both and fires the answers of one back at the other —just to .show that short-run monopoly practices result in the same kind of traffic snarl no matter who applies them, or where...
...An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution elicited condemnation from Nicholas Murray Butler and from ex-PTesident Taft...
...The Beards have chosen their illustrations from the writings of men—and women—in all parts of the country and from every social group that was articulate...
...That is my character...
...He began by going into a cathedral, and when he heard a poor woman praying for help to the iVrgin, following her into the street and answering her prayer With such serene joys he replaced the turbulent excitements of a wastrel's life...
...But these leaders, and the writers who followed them, did not merely borrow from European writers the idea of civilization: they adapted it to American actualities and to American requirements...
...He is sure, at least, that under his System she would not have grown fat...
...In the Arnold years, business learned to rely on the Ant*-Trust Division...
...Mrs...
...Besides these glaring examples, the files of the Division contain the records of many a little company which was saved from extinction by the intervention of the Division...
...Although his fellow-workers there have not yet seen him, Ely Cal-bertson is often, for his soul's sake, spending his last years in the sweat and grime of a Pittsburgh steel mill...
...International cartels are formed, dominated by private groups without public responsibility...
...stimulated by the decadent vein in French literature, he turned inward to his own nervous system to find the goal of endeavor that society had denied him...
...In the following ir-{ tide...
...At a certain stage," writes Arnold, "in the growth [of great industries] hardening of the arteries takes place...
...But, nevertheless, she loyally supported his more sublime ambitions, and spurred him toward a greater career than that in which she could be his partner...
...As the war more and more completely stamped out the revolution, he lost the last shreds of his faith in the masses—lost even his wish to understand them...
...Brookline to pay his passage to America, where he thought he could best collect the threads of that misplaced ambition...
...But long before Arnold came to the Antl-Trust Division, the tide had set in another direction...
...I knew that it had tw parts: the first a raggedy and disirrtegratrngji^ tempt to make a royal income playing for «gu stakes...
...But such condemnations have not, fortunately, been the whole story...
...Democracy becomes a shell [because] if a private group controls a man's livelihood it can control both his actions and his philosophy...
...It seemed the kindest thing to do—and his kindness was rewarded, years after, by the news that she had married well and grown contentedly fat...
...On the other hand Beard has on occasion been severely criticized by liberals and radicals, -somewhat paradoxically, on the score that his handling of economic factors in history has been that of a "crude determinist" and that his conception of history has been that of a "mystical relativist...
...Arnold truly saw that it would be difficult ever to get effective Anti-Trust regulation of the oil industry until its verticle combinations were destroyed...
...he was also one of the founders of\he'New School for Social Research, and one of the1'leaders in the establishment of the Workers Education Bureau...
...THE appearance of the final volume of the Beards' The Rise of American Civilization is a notable event in the world of scholarship and letters...
...Beard...
...And by the time the money was gone, anxiety was gone—and the need for alcohol...
...Only the leader is active...
...When Beard resigned his professorship at Columbia University on the ground that academic freedom was being jeopardized by the action taken toward pacifist colleagues, the New York Times declared editorially, on October 10, 1917, that Columbia University was to be congratulated upon the resignation of Charles A...
...I have seen only one notable exeeptig* cf a professional player surviving—and that was because he quit...
...Please send two hundred dollars...
...Beard's The Ideal of National Interest, The Open Door at Home, and A Foreign Policy of America on the score that these writings were lacking in realism, patriotism, and international idealism, that they were narrowly "nationalistic" and altogether tendentious...
...MacmUlan...
...Only when his daughter Joyce was born, in 1928, did he explicitly postpone that dream, and decide to spend ten years making Ely Culbertson "the greatest bridge player on earth...
...He drew an older and better generalized moral than that, essentially the one that comes down to us from Plato...
...As he had no money left, he got a job polishing spitoons on the S.S...
...Here is the record of...
...He could not enter with suspended judgment into the question of the extent of their application to these facts...
...Similarly all manner of restrictions, including production curtailment by order of collusive government bodies, have been loaded upon the independent owner of oil wells...
...The flowering of the Athenian political, democracy was caught by Herod-atu»»nd Thucydides in their classic pages on the "Creek spirit" And so it went through the ages—with Machiavelli writing the history of Florence and the battling Italian city-states in the sixteenth | Century—and Voltaire recording the history of his times in the eighteenth...
...It is an order of ideas which can produce neither wealth in peace nor strength in war...
...Thus even on becoming a bridge teacher Ely did not abandon his studies for a world-beating treatise on mass psychology...
...Traffic snarls" have tied up the big war industries—so that getting more production in steel, aluminum, magnesium, beryllium, tin, petroleum or rubber takes a great effort...
...Because the dominant major companies were formed of producers, refiners, pipeline companies and distributors it was almost impossible for an independent, entering one of these fields, to exist...
...Hence Arnold's actual function as traffic cop, even though such traffic regulation was carried on largely by publicity, is considerably better than he predicted in his job-getting book...
...Finally, here in this country, Charles i Austin Beard, dean of American historians, has,' after fifty...
...The voice had grown a little tired and erratic...
...above all, it is dynamic, not static, moral and intellectual, rather than moral alone or intellectual alone...
...You will be surprised—at least I was— that this system was not the obvious one...
...A pile of forty thousand nine hundred and sixty francs was waiting for him on the table...
...U/HILE this process of integration was going, f* «tv the Anti-Trnajt...
...In addition to the many battles Charles A. Beard has waged for academic freedom he has come to grips with the Missouri Pacific, with J. P. Morgan, and with William Randolph Hearst...
...Now he has...
...Culbertson maintains that by playing without panic or superstitution, relying only •» the laws of probability, the knowledge of cards, and the knowledge of men, he can always, av»T a long period, succeeded in this...
...The first symptom of [this] canalization is an unbalanced exchange between organized industry which is restricting production and unorganized farmers and small businessmen who are unable to restrict production . . . The next symptom is the attempt of the aomestic cartels to control foreign markets so that the nation can get rid of this so-called over-production, this inconvenient wealth that threatens an artificial price structure...
...It was, I suppose, an irresponsible child's way of accepting parental responsibility—to turn it into a mad, egregiously ambitious, and quite fantastical adventure...
...At Madison, Wisconsin, the Government tried most of the major oil companies and convicted them of a vast conspiracy to freeze out independents...
...With her husband she has helped teach a whole generation of'American youths a more realistic and a genuinely appreciative view of American history and institutions: the Beards' textbooks have in tHe'truIy American spirit set a high example for the sharing of understanding and knowledge...
...Arnold of the Department of Justice may have a sharply different tag...
...years of distinguished ..scholarship, devoted himself to the age...
...There will be many who will not accept without qualification some of these analyses...
...the relation of it all to other scientfic concepts...
...Jo" was not, to be sure, independently'interest-ed in social systems, or ethical theories, or mass psychology, or Marx versus Proudhon, or Trotsky versus Stalin...
...But all of them are in their own way masterpieces...
...He gulps what satisfaction he can get for that...
...the others, so to apeak, have delegated to him not only most of their authority, but a great part of their emotional and intellectual mechanisms...
...1 . . The notable exception is I." It required a love, a marriage, another nervous breakdown, and the all but fatal illness of his wife, to wake him quit...
...In superficial moods you will find him complacent of his highclass notoriety, and the entree it gives him among kings and financiers and New York's "four hundred...
...Whatever its limitations, it should be regarded as one of the monuments of American civilization, of the American snirit THE AMERICAN SPIRIT...
...They have been, in short, great teachers...
...The swan song was over...
...The Beards point out that in fact the term civilization was used in many different ways, for many different purposes, sometimes for opposite ones...
...He has been heartily praised for his public services by eminent statesmen, American and foreign...
...I've spent a lifetime getting ready to do something wonderful...
...They conclude, on the basis of their study of the documents, that one idea, the idea of civilization in America or of American civilization, has expressed the American spirit better than any other single idea, better, for example, than the idea of democracy, or the idea of liberty, or "the American way of life...
...It assigns to history in the United States, so conceived, unique features in origins, substance, and development...
...Thus profits have always been low in retailing, which is a big field for independents, but they have been high for refiners and pipeline companies...
...This volume is based on extensive research in the writings of leading Americans and in those of obscure Americans, in pamphlets, books, articles, speeches, orations, newspaper reports...
...5.00...
...The Historian IN every age the great historian — known in the ancient world as "the inquirer after truth"— has tried to capture the distinctive historic spirit of his lime and civilization...
...Culbertson was an alcoholic recluse, and very near to a chronic hypochondriac, when he devised his next System...
...He had lived six years as a gambler, lived high for four years and very low indeed for two, when he finally accepted her astute advice to win his fortune teaching bridge instead of playing it...
...If it may seem to some readers that The American Spirit is too profusely illustrated by lengthy quotations, the Beards probably had good reasons of their own for allowing the men and women witnesses they have marshalled to speak for themselves...
...Volr IV- of- THE RISE- OF AMERICAN CIVHJZATJPN,: By Charles A and Mary ft...
...th»\ would, have prevented it were being stopped...
...She has been described both as the best woman bridge player in the world, and as the best'bridge player in the world...
...One of the methods was a means by which "distress gasoline" was bought up by a member of the "pool" and thus kept out of the hands of little retailers (who might retail it at the low price its distress condition indicated was right...
...His letters to...
...public's favor and away from undercover conspiracies...
...But the situation was infinitely more complex, and the results of having spread so much of such damaging material on the record will eventually provide the ammunition for an effective attack by some other prosecutor...
...1 That he did finally invent a world-famous system for playing bridge is only a corroboratiaa of this exploit in self-knowledge, for it wa» done by declaring a sort of moratorium on bSl ideals...
...Thoughts and emotions," he says, "are communicated from one crowd-cell to another through these group leaders, who act in the double capacity of transmitters and initiators of action...
...The deaf ' hand of Aluminum Company of America was removed from control over magnesium—so that Ford, Kaiser, an independent Dow Chemical Co...
...In spite of the fact that the Beards had occasioned much bitter criticism from conservative scholars - and public men, The Rise of American Civilization met with widespread praise in scholarly circles and with extraordinary appreciation by the general public...
...And that is due to a mixture of conceit with self-distrust...
...The idea of civilisation, in a composite formulation, embraces a conception of history as a struggle of human beings in the world for individual and social perfection—for the good, the true, the beautiful—against ignorance, disease, the harshness of physical nature, the forces of barbarism in individuals and society...
...Beard himself was one of the founders of Ruskin College St Oxford University, designed to train labor leaders...
...Pittsburgh is always the goal of these redemption walk-outs, for Culbertson is up-to-date, and in modern times it is the proletariat, not the peasantry, to which the revolted aristocrat returns...
...It was used, for example, to justify free labor and slave labor, free trade and laissez faire, tariffs and a balanced or planned economy, individualism and collectivism, isolationism and a world mission under arms...
...Collaborating once again with his wife.Vtfary Beard, he has written the fourth and concluding volume to their Rise of American Civilization...
...Thurman Wesley Arnold certainly is a queer bird...
...Beard, the author of "bad . . . books . . . grossly unscientific . . . unrelated to fact and quite 'unconvincing in their nature...
...Manetho, scribe of Thebes in the era of the P h a r o h s, has left a record which manages in its way to convey the tone of a plodding, static Egyptian civilization...
...He told the pompous oilmen they had balled up petroleum...
...So true was this, and so impressive, that the well-known advertising firm of Young&Rubicam adopted Culbertson's "System of Mass Psychology"—so far as he Had ever managed to get it into shape—and published it in the form of a circular for distribution to prospective clients...
...He also maintain* that if the period is too long, he will sJ« ways fail...
...To him and to Jo both, his income from cards was but a subsidy toward that end...
...It is needless to say that in the long run anxiety, with the help of stomach ulcers, won this game...
...He could not regard his brilliant intuitions of reality merely as a mode of conceiving an infinite variety of facts...
...The American spirit excludes all forms of total determinism, divine or economic...
...You will find that "System of Mass Psychology" appended in ten pages of fine print to his autobiography, and I earnestly recommend those pages to your thought and study...
...Beard has the unique honor of having been elected by his scholarly colleagues as president both of the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association...
...The Big Stickler "AN idiot in a powder was the way one old platocrat described trust-basting Thurman Arnold...
Vol. 26 • February 1943 • No. 9
