The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Is the World Getting Better? WHEN I was a boy in the little red schoolhouse, the favorite subject for debate was: "Resolved that the world is getting better." It...
...He writes about all sorts of things: education, wealth, democracy, leisure, health...
...What Morris sets out to prove is that by 1976, in 21 years, the people of this country will be better off beyond imagination-and not only physically, but socially, politically and morally...
...We shall have, we are told, more security and, therefore, far less bigotry and hate...
...His attitude has been developed during a tough life in the real world...
...And he has usually won his fights...
...census reports and his extensive card-catalogues...
...It's a fine world?¬and it is getting better...
...When, for example, he talks about the evils of censorship, he knows down to the last detail what he is talking about...
...We have made all sorts of progress faster than ever before...
...I must confess that I am not neutral in this great conflict...
...The devil has been reinvented and goes up and down the land as he has not done for many a generation...
...But his feel about the world is based on an enormous amount of practical experience in many fields...
...He has fought many a fight for free speech and against all sorts of dictation and coercion...
...To every field of endeavor he applies his logic of extrapolation...
...He may not be a careful statistician and may be a little careless in throwing facts about...
...Nobody can guarantee anything, but isn't it a wonderful idea...
...What a prophet he would have turned out to be...
...Instead of being crushed into uniformity by the industrial and political behemoth, each of us will have a greater chance to develop his own queer little quirks...
...Things have gotten so and so much better in so and so many years-hence, they will just have to go on getting better...
...And on the cautious negative side is another friend, THE NEW LEADER'S Literary Consultant, Granville Hicks...
...I must confess that, from a strictly scientific, statistical point of view, friend Morris at many points failed to make his case...
...It is the air of security and sanity...
...I suppose our very speed makes them dizzy and suspicious...
...We have too much Hiroshima psychology...
...I said to myself, "This book is for me...
...In his last chapter, friend Morris really goes to town...
...And just because of the speed with which we have been making discoveries and inventions and increasing our wealth, a lot of literary fellows have taken to writing the way the 17th-century preachers used to talk...
...While most of us have been theorizing about the issues of liberalism, Morris has been in there fighting...
...It's about time to shake ourselves loose...
...Then Morris Ernst came along with this book Utopia 1976 and said, "To hell with the devil...
...As Granville Hicks remarked in his review in the November 21 NEW LEADER, some of the book's assertions are based on wishful thinking...
...Not only shall we have in 21 years more wealth, more leisure, more education...
...Hopeful Morris is taking for granted that our citizens will be more alert than they were from 1922 to 1929 and that the Government will exercise more effective controls...
...For a long time, I have been waiting for someone to take the hopeful side in our look toward the future...
...Morris Ernst is a successful man, a successful good citizen...
...To me the important thing about this book is not any idea which it contains or any set of facts...
...In his sort of world, it is natural for the right to come out on top -if not just now, then a little later...
...He is the sort of chap who is used to winning...
...I have never liked these fellows who take so much pleasure in prophesying that we will all be blown up early tomorrow morning...
...He is probably right about this, but who can tell for sure...
...He has taken part in the legal fights over their forms of organization and has an exact picture of how they work...
...There has been something oddly illogical about a good deal of our recent thinking...
...Or imagine that between now and 1976 we have another 1929...
...It was a theme which could be guaranteed to rouse rural orators to their hottest eloquence...
...His knowledge of the evolving techniques in our homes and on our farms seems practically inexhaustible...
...And now, to my delight, we have the old argument resumed in New York with a pair of our most astute contributors taking opposite sides...
...And you can say the same thing about his discussions of trusts and monopolies...
...Judges would give tousled heads many a scratch before awarding prizes, and arguments were stoutly continued for many a mile along well rutted roads which led to home...
...His moving picture of the changing past prepares a reader to accept astonishing developments as naturally characteristic of the immediate future...
...It is hard to believe that our writer's picture of this changing country has been made exclusively from material culled from U.S...
...Defending the optimistic affirmative is that smart lawyer, my old friend Morris L. Ernst...
...Now suppose some good Roman liberal had taken a flier in this sort of thinking in the year 100 or a Frenchman or Englishman had tried it about the year 1300...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 48
