Agnes Meyer's Life of Service
KOCH, ADRIENNE
Agnes Meyer's Life of Service Out of These Roots. By Agnes E. Meyer. Little, Brown. 385 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Adrienne Koch Coordinator, Program in Humanities, Division of General Education,...
...Meyer describes herself as a Republican but has launched numerous campaigns for liberal causes—notably her efforts to revitalize and improve public education, and, more recently, her rousing attacks on McCarthyism as a moral and political evil that the Republican party can no longer afford to tolerate...
...In an interesting passage toward the close of her book, she reflects that "John Dewey's philosophy, the wisdom of the Chinese sages, and Thomas Mann's biographical novels . . . alike teach distrust of the abstract and the absolute, of Utopias whether created by romanticism, Communism or religionism," and these notable influences in their diverse ways confirmed her own ardent preference for democracy...
...Meyer and made him a kind of incorruptible moral guide in her endeavors...
...Her services to the democratic community have been many...
...Meyer well realizes...
...She writes cleanly, with punch, wit and strength...
...Meyer is thoroughly familiar with the philosophy which underlies concrete reform proposals...
...I am tempted to nominate Mrs...
...But she refuses to evade them...
...Agnes Meyer as Executive Assistant to Socrates...
...Thus, she frequently cites the New Deal as part of the trend toward a socialist state...
...Meyer has touched—from her political apprenticeship in Westchester County under Boss Ward, to valiant lone struggles for improving the home front during and after World War II, to urgent problems of education, health and welfare in more recent years—she has made a significant contribution, always based on realistic and independent judgment...
...The demands made upon a career woman who is not prepared to sell short her function as wife, mother, home-manager and hostess are heavy indeed, as Mrs...
...By now, most American liberals can take this statement without suffering an apoplectic seizure, but Mrs...
...Politically, Mrs...
...She has known how to learn from experience and admit her mistakes...
...She is the mother of five children, now all grown up with their own families and careers...
...Meyer would probably have forth-rightly said the same thing in the heydey of the New Deal...
...Had Socrates lived in our own era of Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor and Big Technology, he would have needed a formidable staff of assistants to help him with his work of educating the individual soul to critical awareness of itself and its values...
...Meyer is the wife of Eugene Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post .and previously a successful banker and distinguished public servant...
...and this belief has made her sharply critical of what she calls a "socialist" concept of the state, in which an enormous Federal bureaucracy takes care of "the people," while the latter, cut off from healthy mutual relations with local and state government, inertly wait for "the Government" to take care of them...
...Yet, in a fine concluding essay on the vitality of American democracy, she points out somewhat inconsistently that "with rational discrimination we took over the constructive parts of the Socialist program—social security, unemployment insurance and aid to dependent children—while rejecting extreme measures...
...Meyer has felt that individual participation in the democratic process is essential to a functioning democracy...
...In a properly Jeffersonian spirit, Mrs...
...The first decisive influence on her thought was John Dewey, who later became a good friend...
...One of the most engaging qualities of this book is its frank and ironic recognition that "women aren't men...
...Meyer writes, "is a government that promises to be indestructible as long as it keeps open its many avenues for the development of the individual...
...She is a magnetic public speaker and brings to the lecture and conference rooms the grace and charm of a cultivated woman...
...She is at home in the marketplace of ideas...
...and one senses, in this record of an unusually active, fruitful life, a ripening wisdom that bespeaks that rare trait: a capacity for adult learning...
...I know of no recent book that communicates so movingly the personal meaning of American democracy...
...Reviewed by Adrienne Koch Coordinator, Program in Humanities, Division of General Education, NYU Socrates, searching for a metaphor to explain his mission among men, called himself a midwife who helped others bring their ideas to birth...
...However, the very vigor and pert-ness of judgment that one admires in this book occasionally lead the author into difficulties...
...Unlike most American women active in public service, Mrs...
...Our American democracy," Mrs...
...This book, with its richness of ideas, its concern with bettering conditions of life for underprivileged Americans, its infectious high spirit, and its truly fabulous record of friendships and of insights into people and cultures, is the story not only of an exceptional American woman but of a strong faith that seems prepared to weather whatever crises lie ahead...
...Mrs...
...In every area Mrs...
...She says with characteristic breeziness that she is "incurably bourgeois and not in the least apologetic about it...
...Meyer is no doctrinaire...
...Dewey's humility, his simplicity, his hard common sense combined with faith in the use of intelligence to solve social problems, took him out of the realm of professional philosophers for Mrs...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 1
