THE RIGHT TO BE NEUTRAL
Dane, Allan
The Right to Be Neutral Reviewed by ALLAN DANE INSTEAD OF ARMS, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES. By Count Folke Bernadotte. Bunniers Publ., Stockholm-New York. 229 pages. $3 00. $3.00. IT WAS STILL too...
...Dropping the editorial page of the Times, I turned around and lent an ear...
...Eaoisme sacre...
...or of a mother talking to an indignant child with a suitcase, apparently threatening to leave home ( "No, I won't apologize — and neither will your father...
...Perhaps then we would be aMe to learn more of Thurber's uniquely expressed personality—a personality that represents the offspring of a strange marriage between a wisdom pragmatically idealistic and tragically comic developed in a style artlessly contrived, aimlessly directional, sentimentally sophisticated...
...Anyway, he admits that his friends were 'members of banking and industrial circles.' He can't find nice enough words for General I'atton...
...A noble put - pose, to be sums A worthwhile, warmly humane cause...
...You see, Harry, you keep telling me objectivity r, a virtue...
...The rest of the woi Id, and certainly the other peoples, didn't give a hoot about who won...
...As the lights were fading, I glanced at the hist words in Bernadotte's message . . . "mercy instead of arms...
...he snorted and waved a poorly published, paper-bound booklet in front of my nose...
...As for the Red Cross work, why, he started m Germany because Infigured nobody else would help them right after the war...
...he urged me...
...and of what all these meant to himself and his family...
...242 pages...
...But these days, old man Grotius' ideas are as outmoded as the minuet Wilson started out by urging everybody to be 'neutral m thought' and he wound up at war himself...
...And the way he tried to stop Moscow's efforts to make the Red Cross into a Communist front affair...
...Saga of a Working Stiff Reviewed by DAVID I. ASHE "UNION GUY," by Claytdn W. Fountain...
...Would that we all had the same beast in us that James Thurber reveals in Tlse Beast in Me and Other Animals...
...cartoons and drawings even in thost that have a touch of the touched about them—there is a smiling, though do termined commentary on the perverst world surrounding him...
...But it's not because he loved the Germans that he wanted to help them...
...Now the other fellow intervened...
...Suppose that the Nazis would have won because all these little Bernadottes just couldn't make up their minds to help us what then...
...304 paye...
...Here is a man who is supremely logical, yet v. ho is apparently confused and dejected bv the lack of reason or purpose in the life around linn - vogc table, animal, and mineral...
...In both aspects it makes interesting and worthwhile reading...
...AS A FEW PEOPLE were shoving right past us to some empty seats down the row, Frank passed me the booklet...
...Hut that's not what I'm objecting to...
...Assuming, however, that the beast in him and in us cannot, for some reason get together and thrash out the whole business, there is another possible way of getting to understand Thurber...
...But there is more in The Beast in Me than stories, drawings, and cartoons...
...Sure it is, in the laboratory and in the text books:, Hut we're deal ing with live people, and you just can't afford such a cool, calm, and collected indifference high above the struggle when it's your life that is being fought about...
...Instead of answering, he went on talking to me: "Bernadotte performed a useful purpose, and that's what matters in the last analysis...
...His heart was always in the right spot, and he would have fought the Nazis and the Soviets if they had invaded his country...
...Those naive souls who still believe that it is possible to work with Communists in labor unions and in civic organizations "so long as we are fighting for the same things" would get a liberal education by reading this book...
...lines' Thurber...
...Ill our days, in our world of jungle morals and playing for lu vs...
...His disillusionment began when he was called before the Party's Disciplinary Commission and upbraided for daring to read a pamphlet by Lovestone...
...Bernadotte was really a highly moral man...
...It came as a shock to the author that as a party member he had no right to select his own reading matter...
...Fountain is another of the long list of former Communists who came to the realization that membership in the Communist Party is incompatible with personal integrity and intellectual honesty...
...Thurber's Beast such a strangely wonderful creature...
...The Beast Is Less Alarming Bv MITCHEL RAMSEY THE BEAST IN ME AND OTHEK ANIMALS...
...He tried haid to do the right thing, and that becomes clear from the way the Germans and Soviets handled him...
...and of the union's rise to its present position of power and prestige under the able leadership of Walter Reuther...
...He even protests against the Nuremberg Trials...
...Yet when it comes to helping us, he backs out...
...And he was right, wasn't he','" "Ah, you're just a Milquetoast like him," Frank exclaimed with disgust...
...Look at it purely pragmatically you're the felow who always talks pragmatism...
...Take it easy, Frank," the other boy urged him...
...I'm telling you'' —and he turned back to his irascible companion after all, he did do a lot of good...
...2,75...
...All he cared about was the Germans...
...He has no right to be neutral, not in our days he hasn't," the black-haired fellow with the horn-rimmed spectacles insisted...
...of its internal political struggles...
...And the key to this labor of love is to be found in the subtitle of The Beasl in Me that reads: "A newcollection of pieces and drawings about human beings and less alarming creatures...
...On every other page he feels sorry for the Germans...
...Yes, and also to stop the Rumanian Red Cross from helping Gi/heral Markos...
...New York: Viking Press...
...WHICH IS DEDICATED to the late Eddie Levinson, formerly an editor of tha JVeie Leader, is aptly described by the publisher as "the personal history of an American worker and the story of the birth and growth of a great union...
...A thankless and a dan gerous task...
...For example, in "The Glass o Fashion," a story that, like most o the others, first appeared in the Neu Yorker, Thurber assumes an air o innocence to more effectively deliver ; few gentle jibes at the newly discoverei art of "displaying" prominent customer...
...See, Mister"—and he turned to me- -¦ "look at it this way...
...of Communist intrigue and doublecross...
...a little too moral perhaps...
...Harry didn't seem impressed...
...of being fired for refusing to sign an antiunion petition...
...Allan Dane has written for Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Higher Education, etc...
...The meeting was about to begin...
...The author, who now does publicity work for the United Automobile Workers-CIO, tells from his own personal experience of earning $111.75 for a fiveday week...
...I don't like lu.s attitude either," the quiet young man with the white skin and tired eyes confessed sheepishly...
...Also vividly told is the story of the struggles of the U.A.W., against overwhelming odds, to win a foothold in the industry...
...of the constant dread of being laid oil at the whim of a foreman...
...He did help a lot of people during the war, and tin Fled Cross saved a lot of I'Ws uh.il got* food to a good many who' would have suffered without it...
...Oh yea?'' my neighbor retorted...
...New York: Ha* con it...
...Neutrality was something nice when feudal lords were quarreling, or even when two lousy imperialists were at war...
...There are essays, short stories, a selection ol "visit pieces" written for the Neie Yorker's Talk of the Town, an exhaustive survey of daytime radio, fantasies, all clone with the same warmth, charm, and wisdom that make...
...THIS BOOK...
...Just look at it...
...David I. Ashe is legal counsel for numerous trade unions...
...by head waiters...
...italics mine) Now, while this is said in the same manner that Thurber says almost everything—quietly and almost unobtrusively- it has a"significanee that it would be careless to overlook...
...No, •Frank," Harry persevered...
...Again, though more directly, in hi...
...I had just enough time to run across a welter of misprints and mentally complain about the rush-job the pub lishers must have done to get this booklet on the market as soon as possible after the Count's assassination, when Frank returned to the attack...
...His lot to, he writes, was 'Judge not that ye be not judged.' Now I don't agree with it, but I can see his point...
...The first thing he did was to try to get ttwin some help...
...could one afford nol lo take sides'.' How could one be neutral and yi I be a Man...
...Here you have a man who claims to have shared our ideals, our convictions...
...Why, the Soviets themselves have a lot of responsibility for the way the Nazis dealt with the Russians, according to his account...
...With the Tafts and Hartleys still battling to restrict and cripple labor unions, it is well to recall what the life of an American worker was like in as giant an industry as automobile manufacturing before a union came along...
...Hut my two interlocutors had lar.ed a weighty, a vital issue...
...At last Frank agreed...
...What I'm arguing about, though, is something different altogether...
...Across all the trite details and atrocious style of Hi-rnailolte's autobiography there ran an appealing, profound, sincere, devoted luunanitiii ian • Ii oak a spil it we need moi e of...
...And look at all this paternalistic nonsense about his royal grandmother, the (neck Queen and the Belgian dynasty...
...It takes a great man to force himself to be neutral, to .act neutral, and to help both sides when you actually prefer one to the other, lie had the highest goals to help men, to humanize war...
...Only "advanced revolutionary minds," he was solemnly informed, 'were capable of comprehending the writings of such renegades as Lovestone and Trotsky...
...He all but teaches us from the coM, superrntional Nordic heights of his wisdom that there is no such thing as a just war...
...Brace and Company...
...If the Allies had lost, that man of 'high morals' would have been sti'wed into soap with all his morals And all his pretty biblical phrases and Latin mottos wouldn't save him from being made into lampshades at Buchen Wiild or into freezing bis tender royal limbs while mining gold at Kolyma...
...of company-unionism...
...And that's the man the UN picked to mediate in Palestine...
...IT WAS STILL too early for the perfromance to start and the two men seated next to me were heatedly discussing something...
...Why, he virtually asks us to excuse the Nazis' behavior...
...You just can't afford to be a moral eunuch these days not withHitlers and Statins around...
...He's got a lot of interesting details on the way Molotov sabotaged his efforts to help Russian prisoners of war in Germany during the war...
...To wit, th< picture- of a trochee encountering a spondee, or of a female Volt with all her Ergs in one Gasket, the cartoon of two rabbits lolling on the grass ("Well, sir, he was the most astonished magician you ever saw in your life...
Vol. 32 • March 1949 • No. 12
