The Smooth Deal
HUITT, RALPH K.
The Smooth Deal T H E NEW AMERICA, by Karl E. Meyer. Basic Books. 2 1 1 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Ralph K. Huitt THOUGH it seems almost like ancient history it really was not so long ago that...
...He has lived and traveled extensively throughout India...
...Kennedy's New Frontier...
...Nobody believes in Utopia any more...
...This, he argues, is more than just a change in style...
...Many who also like and admire Mr...
...Still another is a clinically detached assessment of the uninspiring performance of journalism, his own profession...
...In each case, of course, it is not the address itself but the influences in American life symbolized by it which matter...
...THE REVIEWERS RAtPH K. HUITT, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, has worked as a consultant in the Senate offices of fyndon B. Johnson and William Proxmire...
...For instance, Meyer likes and admires John F. Kennedy, and he believes the President will revitalize national politics unless the bad habits and attitudes developed in Washington under the Eisenhower Administration "blight the promise of Mr...
...He does not like the change...
...HENRY C. HART, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, is director of the University's Indian Studies program...
...One tells just how those personal letters from Senators are mass produced down to the machine-made signature...
...One may agree that, except for civil rights, the boldest political proposals today are "warmed-over New Deal," and go further to think that the tragedy of modern liberalism is precisely that its ideas are used up— which might then lead one to wonder why the issues politicians ought to be debating are hardly mentioned...
...Meyer dislikes "the cult of slickness in politics—in which, carried to the logical extreme, issues become slogans, leadership becomes play-acting, and the means of politics an end in themselves...
...T h e political insight's are shrewd and original, the writing professionally polished and accurate, the wit keen but astringent because the author is not amused by what he describes...
...But most readers, I believe, will agree that The New America is an admirable job...
...PRISCILLA ROBERTSON is a former editor of The Humanist...
...Any one of several of these chapters would be almost worth the price of the book...
...Another specifies the office furnishings which are the prescribed status symbols of each grade in the higher executive echelons...
...What is more important, he criticizes the new America unsparingly but without rancor...
...Kennedy will remark that Kennedy himself pretty well personified the Smooth Deal Meyer describes, and that making Congress and the bureaucracy respond to him has always been a crucial test of a President...
...The success of reform has killed off reformers...
...Wall.Street stood for the inordinate control of finance capital over politics and the economy, and Madison Avenue suggests the pervasive sway over all our habits and attitudes exercised by the practiced manipulators of symbols...
...MAX FRANKEt was a member of the New York Times' Moscow bureau from 1957 to 1960, and he covered Khrushchev's visit to the United Nations last fall...
...Fifty years ago an uninhibited regionalism was largely responsible for 130 lynchings in a single year...
...One hundred years ago (a date Meyer selects for comparison) there was indeed a clear-cut political issue, which the American people were about to settle at the cost of a halfmillion lives...
...The last decade, for all its shortcomings, has produced more progress toward equality for all our citizens than any other—and surely the nationalization of values had something to do with it...
...In a series of sharply etched essays, Meyer describes the symptoms of the change...
...the parties of dissent are succeeded by those extreme manifestations of overconformity, the beatniks and Buckleyites...
...Only the Supreme Court gets a good word—for its judicial activism in a decade of political passivity...
...In this brilliant and biting analysis of "politics and society in the age of the Smooth Deal," Karl Meyer examines the transition in the United States from "the politics of the country store to the politics of the supermarket"— a new politics suffused with the Madison Avenue point of view...
...And some will find it hard to share the nostalgia for the past which permeates the book, the American progressive's historic faith in an earlier age which was simpler and more heroic...
...Reviewed by Ralph K. Huitt THOUGH it seems almost like ancient history it really was not so long ago that liberal writers worried about a tiny piece of real estate called "Wall Street...
...It all depends on which aspects of it one chooses to consider...
...he is like a good surgeon who probes only because he loves the patient...
...The causes of the change are found in all those forces which have helped to bring conformity and uniformity to American life—the virtual prohibition of immigration ("the melting pot has turned into a pressure cooker"), the decline of regionalism, the triumph of mass culture...
...Moderation" is practiced to excess...
...One measure of the vitality of this book is the frequency with which the reader who likes it will want to say, "Yes, but...
...Every age, as Dickens wrote, is the best of times and the worst of times...
...in the politician's preoccupation with a favorable "image," with its connotation of deception, there is "a symptom of potential corruption of our political system...
...In the "new America" the rough edges are disappearing—politics is bland, minor parties are gone, regional and even individual differences are muted...
...Today the principal source of their anxiety is located about three miles due north of there, in a few blocks of Madison Avenue...
...Meyer apparently is as fascinated by political "process" as the people he discusses...
Vol. 25 • August 1961 • No. 8
