MAX LERNER'S BIG DEAL
Seligman, Dan
WRITERS aNd WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTIOH Max Lerner's Big Deal Reviewed by PANIE L SELIGMAN ACTIONS AND PASSIONS: Notes on the Multiple Revolution of Our Time. By Max Lemer....
...The author, who was born in the Alabama black belt in the 1870's and who for the past thirty years has practiced law in the North, pulls no punches...
...Jerome Weidman, not too long after his chastisement by Stalinist reviewers and their dupes, was a wise and sophisticated, not-so-young man who had learned the craft of writing slick, journalistic stories and novels...
...Action* end Passions has less of this sort of thing...
...IT IS PERFECTLY LEGITIMATE to raise the question as to whether legislation, as in the proposed federal civil rights bills, can change the deep-seated mores of the American white man, north and south, which have kept the American Negro in the position of an inferior caste...
...Weidman has always been fascinated by the gimme gimmick or what might be called The Rise and Pratt-Fall of Horatio Alger...
...It is, as has bean shown in this work, pride of blood in the white man...
...Lerner's, Public Journal, this is a collection of editorials from PAf...
...A Literary Klansman Reviewed by GERALD M. CAPERS WHITHER SOLID SOUTH...
...He had taken a trip around the world to justify his new style...
...1949...
...Lerner was in one of his Stalinoid phases, and its readers had to plough through long and belligerent proofs that Yugoslavia was a democracy, that Bullitt's apprehensions about Russia were "psychotic," and that the Red Army fought well because of Communism...
...The Negro, who in his native Africa has never produced a national state nor risen above an aboriginal culture, is biologically inferior and will remain so...
...His technique is simple...
...Lerner when he could be had for a nickel, are willing to take him when he is one to Ave years out of data and expansive to boot The present volume is no worse than Public Journal and probably a little better...
...Actually, the "multiple revolution" is detailed in only one of the editorials, and it refers merely to the fact that the world is changing in many different ways, politically, scientifically, culturally...
...We are convinced of his fascination with his subject, but are unconvinced of his comprehension of all the factors that make a self-made man...
...Henry...
...Jerome Weidman was later a sad young man ostracized by "liberals" who mistook his wit and callow moral fervor for intolerance...
...316 pages...
...in the present, MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Nimitz...
...Thus when Howard Fast is prevented from speaking at Columbia, the real issue is not what happens to Fast, but what happens to Communists all over the country...
...There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this —-it certainly makes livelier reading than Mark Sullivan or Edwin L. James —but when it is combined with colorful, high-sounding rhetoric and masqueraded as heavy thinking, the reader has a right to protest...
...Lerner is the grand master of the big deal...
...By Jerome Weidman...
...A further implication, apparently, would be (a) that PM readers like to re-read old editorials, or (b) that non-PM readers, having ignored Mr...
...Collins...
...This results in laughable catastrophes and bathetic comic situations...
...tIKE A PREVIOUS VOLUME of Mr...
...Gerald Capers Is Professor of Hisiorv si Tulane Universlfte...
...The Gimme Gimmick Reviewed by JOHN FRANKLIN BARDIN THE PRICE IS RIGHT...
...Lerner would appear to have an infallible formula...
...Since absolutely everything that occurs is, in one way or another, a sign of the times, Mr...
...Henry Cade's introspection is that of a man with no self-knowledge, a realistic device since the Henry Cades of the world do often fail to understand themselves...
...It should break its unnatural alliance with New Deal Democrats and labor, and join northern Republicans jn a true conservative Party...
...There the American Negroes who wish to do so may migrate, in order to escape the "cultural hell" of second class citizenship in continental United States...
...The core of the book is a legalistic appraisal of and an attack upon the FEPC and the full employment bills, both of which would create a "concentrated bureaucratic government with spies and secret police...
...Hdrcourt, Brace and Company...
...The author is never sure when he is satirizing his characters and when he is doing a job of straight reporting...
...Like most other successful entrepreneur-authors—part business-man, part mkn-of-letters—Mr...
...334 pages...
...It is no accident that Collins identifies "free enterprise" with white supremacy and state rights...
...And so on, ad nauseam...
...With the same breath he damns Negroes and "Negro-lovers," Franklin Roosevelt, organized labor, the CIO, David Lilienthal, and every liberal leader and movement of the past two decades...
...Price $3.50...
...Prejudice" against the Negro, says Collins, has been "called 'color prejudice' and 'color caste.' Fundamentally it is not a question of color...
...All of which leaves^ Mr...
...a group of young writers and their reiatedness to the shifting, invidious standards of our culture...
...He grew up with the locutions, the longings, the sensibility'of the city...
...What can the South do to save itself and the, Constitution...
...Lerner's subtitle—"the multiple revolution of our time...
...On the same day that his syndicate loses the temperamental cartoonist, Cade is lucky, enough to discover a hick columnist who becomes a national sensation overnight • • • THE AUTHOR MAY HAVE thought that he was accomplishing a subtle analysis of the mind and motives of a man after his first million...
...He knows how to root out the slightest elements of dramatic conflict from the news and play them for all they are worth...
...JEROME WEIDMAN WAS ONCE an angry young man who wrote a savage satirical novel called I Can Get It For You Wholesale...
...Its publication, frankly, comes as a distinct surprise to me, the implication would seem to be that Public Journal did pretty well at the booksellers, despite the general unfavorable reviews it got, and despite the known apathy of most readers in the face of a collection...
...Neither is it prejudice...
...And so on...
...The book has a grave flaw...
...It is rather a belligerent'and highly emotionalized rationalization for the most reactionary DiKiecrat position...
...In the past it gave the nation ts greatest leaders, Jefferson and Jackson...
...He writes about any event that happens to be in the news, devotes one or two paragraphs to sketching in the facts and personalities involved, and then says: what is important is not the event itself, but the event as a sign of the times...
...it is his unpleasant task to keep the syndicate's star cartoonist from signing, with a rival firm...
...All there was to distinguish him from highly-paid hacks like John Hersey and Frederick Wakeman was something he probably regarded as a defect: the residue of his originality...
...Although Mr...
...3.75...
...Henry Cade is in love with his employer's wife and sleeping with his own secretary, a good girl who makes him read self-help books...
...He openly states that his purpose is to arouse his "white brethren of the South" from their complacency in the face of a northern and Negro conspiracy to impose upon them a program "infected with the deadly virus of statism...
...3.00...
...The movies interest him because they "are an expression of our values and our hungers...
...Negro protagonists are not meeting this issue squarely...
...Homer Loomis and the Columbians are similarly important "only as a symptom...
...Weidman was trying for was the complete identification of the reader with a man who thinks his intentions are good but discovers his behavior is evil...
...New Orleans: Pelican Publishing Co...
...Cade is an account executive in'a.newspaper syndicate...
...But Collins' "Whither Solid South" is not a rational inqury into the southern and national dilemma...
...Jerome Weidman was a New York guy...
...Weldman's technique, consisting of a pyramiding of anecdotes and black-out skits until an ironic conclusion forces a resolution, allows for no inwardness...
...Public Journal covered the war years, when Mr...
...of segregation, and the bar of suffrage...
...Perhaps, someday an accredited scientist will do a full sociological work-up on...
...Take, for example, the interesting phrase in Mr...
...A reader picking this book off a shelf might be justified in anticipating that he will be introduced to some new and exciting concept, like the permanent revolution or technocracy...
...Weidman has created a recognizable type, he has deprived us of the greater comprehension of character that the novel should give...
...I would still like to know who's going to buy this book...
...it sometimes seems that the author is the victim of his own jape...
...In the United States he has been and should continue Ho be kept in a deservedly inferior status by the "bar of blood, the bar...
...Then, the book's climax is dependent on coincidence, which is inexcusable in a sixth novel...
...It does not take a sociologist's equipment, however, to sense that Henry Cade, the ambitious young man of The Price Is Right reflects Jerome Weidman's altered ego...
...Daniel Seligman is assistant editor of Mercury...
...Lerner one of the most readable and least rewarding of the journalistic heavy thinkers...
...He had exchanged the shoulder-shrug in his style for the affected drawl of the worldly raconteur...
...For the Negro the Federal Government should establish and subsidize a 48th state in Africa...
...67 pmges...
...Lerner seldom brings new ideas to a subject, but he is gifted with a genuine flair for the dramatic...
...Now he is lost in the morass of genteel journalism— and I find him dull...
...Weidman had modelled himself on that paterfamilias of successful novelists, Somerset Maugham...
...By Charles VV...
...All, according to him, have joined in an unholy conspiracy to force Negro equality upon the southerners and a "Russian" state capitalism upon our federal republic of sovereign states...
...ANOTHER TECHNIQUE OF THE big deal is the dramatic phrase applied to the routine or ordinary event...
...Toynbee is significant not for what he actually believes, but for what he represents to us...
...New York...
...The South, by all criteria, is the superior region of the Union — the healthiest, wealthiest, purest, and happiest...
...He once wrote like a New York guy-rand it was good to read...
...If the latter are unwilling to accept full southern demands as a basis for coalition, the South should form its own Democratic party and use its balance of power in the electoral college to throw presidential elections into the House, where it is almost always certain to force its terms upon a divided North...
...New York: Simon & Schuster...
...What it has, mainly, is old-fashioned big-deal liberalism...
...There may be some masochism here...
...This could have been imparted crudely through authorical asides, or adeptly by reporting the action through the eyes, of an intelligent, sensitive bystander who "tskstsks" at the hero...
...What Mr...
...The review ought to be not about Toynbee but about us...
...No book in the entire southern antebellum apolegetic literature exceeds it in bias, and neither Jefferson nor Calhoun in their wildest moments were more dogmatic in their assertion of state rights under the Constitution...
Vol. 32 • April 1949 • No. 14
