COUNTRY CLUB REFLECTIONS

...I hastened to assure him that I wouldn't report him to Martin Dies or to the newly done over Earl Browder either...

...The birds remind me it is time to furnish up the annual Spring column starting with Swinburne's "When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces," and ending with some sort of lyrical apostrophe to the Goat God Pan...

...It was indeed the same man, only up here in what is euphoniously called a camp, and which is really a plain person's dream of Utopia, the man can be himr self and not the big bow-wow executive he is in town...

...I'm just citing this instance to show what Wendell Willkie calls the "American way" can do to make a decent-minded fellow one thing in the city and another up in the country with a hickory shirt on...

...book-writing and making leftist speeches don't pay enough to permit me to hang around places like this long enough to get real chummy with the money boys, even if I wanted to...

...Speaking of robins, there are a couple of fat ones hopping or running (whichever they do is still, I believe, a matter for debate) around the rocks by the brook below my cabin, and boy, what a cabin...

...Of course under no circumstances would he vote for Norman and Bob for anything, but, he added (and I cross my heart, under no solicitation from your correspondent) it was good to live in a country which could produce men of such stature...

...Those of us who cannot participate directly in the war effort, can, by recalling to the common man his great democratic traditions, restore in part the sense of self-sufficiency which today a bewildered America so tragically seems to lack...

...And all the while he was talking, I kept wondering to myself if this could be the same big shot executive who throws his stomach ulcers around in the advertising world and has a scad of bright young men writing glory hallelujah pieces about the dear delights of living in a nation where enterprise is so magnificently free that anyone can go out and set himself up in competition with the Commonwealth and Southern, the Union Pacific, or the Standard Oil...

...In our country where the gap between the common man and the administrators becomes daily more evident, the only hope for getting anything good whatever out of this killing is that our Government be returned to the common man whose labors in factories and on the fields have made it great...

...Furthermore, it has been my experience that capitalists like the one I've been describing are rare as robins in January...

...Bigs...

...Products Of A System I gave him no inkling of my attitude, and he went on to express grave doubts as to the ability of capitalism to solve any major problems of any considerable number of people after the war...

...The members of the club, needless to say, are by no means common...

...I've just come, from a fat-chew with an executive of a large advertising agency who volunteered the opinion that both Westbrook Pegler and Walter Win-chell were pains in the neck, and who is convinced that Wendell Willkie is no more than a walking wind-bag, whereas he expressed a sincere admiration for Norman Thomas and Bob La Follette...

...Affairs will be managed for him by the Mr...

...Here is a high-bracketed country club, an hour from New York in a Connecticut countryside of some thousand lovely acres...

...Country Club Reflections By McALISTER COLEMAN I'M WRITING THIS in a place which is so peaceful and "out of this world," as the youngsters have it, that it makes my Puritan conscience wince to be here...

...Where, however, is the heart to celebrate Spring when at its coming over the lands of Milton and Shelley and Browning and Schiller and Goethe and Heine, too, millions of youths are being prepared for mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale...

...I hope you won't think I'm a radical," he concluded, "it's just that I can't stand the hypocrisy and downright stupidity of most capitalists...

...The Only Hope Now it is no unique discovery of mine that men are the products of a cruel, stupid system of making and producing the world's goods and that when the pressures of this system relax a bit, a capitalist can be as regular a guy as a coal-miner...

...Naturally I'm a guest, and ironically, I'm struggling with the outline of a projected book that is to be the story of what the rank and file, the good old Common Man, has contributed to making this country great...

...Of one thing we may be sure, youth does not ride out at any summons from the common man in any of the warring countries...

...I'll not go so far as to say that some of my best friends are capitalists because that just isn't so...

...No one consults this man, he is to fight and keep his mouth shut...

...Up here in the woods, however, they take their hair down and act and talk quite surprisingly like the rest of us...

...In fact, they are quite hotsy-totsy in the everyday life of the city...

...He thought hiding finance capitalism under the phony name of "free enterprise" was pretty raw, and he wondered out loud why this country which could work such miracles of production in wartime couldn't shoot somewhere near the mark in peacetime...

...I just don't want you to think I'm getting soft about the run of the man-eating sharks...

...Huge downy beds, hot and cold running water in every room, bath tubs all over the place, electricity, Venetian blinds, etc...

...I'll spare you this, though there was a slender beauty of a new moon floating outside my window last night and the sort of stirring in the brown and ivory-black countryside which makes a man listen for "the voice of the turtle," that young King Solomon sang about under a new moon in old Palestine...