The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT Louis Bromfield's Prescription For Reviving a Tired World By William E. Bohn Louis Bromfield has long been one of my favorite people. Here is a first-class novelist who doesn't sit...
...His analysis of the differences between the two ways of doing things is precisely the same as that of Frederick M. Stern, which I once described in this space [The New Leader, December 1, 1952] —except that Dr...
...Russia is...
...When he talks about South Americans or Asians, it is not as if he were discussing some sort of lower animal...
...Consequently, a lot of people in Asia, Africa and South America have a wrong idea of what we are after...
...It is an American pattern...
...He tries to make us think that all this talk about the danger of war and the need for building up our defenses is warmongering...
...Whether he is for a thing or against it, he overstates his case...
...My space is almost gone, and I have not yet given any account of his main idea...
...Stern writes as a European economist to whom the realities of American business and industrial life were a revelation...
...Brazil will, in the course of time, be another...
...With the little countries grouped around the big ones, with barriers broken down and everyone going all-out for production U.S.-style...
...The Bolsheviks should be happy to admit him...
...He bought a farm out in my old state of Ohio...
...In a book which contains so much sound sense, it is disturbing to come upon this dangerous notion...
...And then, all of a sudden, this enormously well-informed chap pulls you up short by saying something which is perfectly ridiculous...
...The new pattern is not a Bromfield pattern...
...Louis Bromfield foresees a happier world...
...And he doesn't run it the way gentlemen do...
...The other point—the one with which I disagree—is Bromfield's theory about the Moscow regime...
...They might learn something from him about farming the way we do it in Ohio...
...To him, they are people...
...I suggest that this man who has spent so much time in far places make his next foreign sojourn within the boundaries of the U.S.S.R...
...A little later, he suggests that the Bolshevik regime will collapse of its own weakness...
...But he thinks America has something that could save mankind if other peoples would take it up and develop it for themselves...
...And he has been to so many places, he knows so much about real things, that you naturally like him and want to go along with him...
...In between his novels and his farm, he has traveled all over the world and found out about other people...
...He comes right out and says that politicians and generals are exaggerating the Russian danger so that they can get appropriations for their military projects: "Much of the menace of Russia is fictitious and has been created through propaganda out of Russia herself and particularly by generals and politicians in the United States...
...He keeps denouncing American politicians for messing around in the affairs of other countries and getting things mixed up...
...In this department, our realistic world-traveler seems to be an old-fashioned Ohio isolationist...
...He has learned all about soil and seed and cattle and crops—and he runs the farm so it makes money...
...The author is, of course, a superb writer...
...His thought is that our American competitive, high-wage, free-enterprise sort of capitalism is entirely different from the feudalistic, cartelistic, restricted and generally unprogressive system that is called capitalism in Europe...
...The man makes it sound good...
...This union, he fancies, will hasten the fall of both regimes...
...The other I violently oppose...
...It is this which we want to establish in the world...
...So I like him...
...Here is a first-class novelist who doesn't sit in a chair and go on writing novels all his life...
...But I am really treating my author badly...
...He doesn't believe in imperialism or dictatorship but in a sort of international osmosis...
...Of Bromfield's two main points about American foreign policy, I approve of one...
...About this there can certainly be no question...
...Now comes this book, A New Pattern for a Tired World (Harper, $3.75...
...obviously, a third...
...Louis Bromfield takes for granted that this thing we call American capitalism, rather than democracy, is the opposite of Communism...
...This world is in the process of arranging itself around a few big productive areas...
...The United States and Canada are one...
...It is hard to write judicially about this book...
...He pictures us achieving this end, not through the United Nations, but through a process of nuclear adhesions...
...His first point is that our State Department has given the world the notion that we are backing up the nineteenth-century forms of imperialism...
...He even imagines that it is a piece of good luck for us that Moscow now has China on its neck...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 11
