A GRIM WARNING AND A ROSY DREAM
Barnes, Harry Elmer
The Progressive's Bookshelf A Grim Warning And A Rosy Dream REPORT ON DEMOBILIZATION, by James R. Mock and Evangeline Thurber. University of Oklahoma Press. $3. MOBILIZING FOR ABUNDANCE, by...
...Industry was no better prepared than government to preside over the transformation...
...The wartime gains of labor were thoroughly and ruthlessly liquidated...
...and because many of the planners were content just to plan—a malady of our time as well...
...What he is aiming at is a bigger and better postwar New Deal, just as the big business boosters are working in the name of free enterprise for more extensive and powerful monopolies...
...Well, that was just what the New Deal asserted it was doing in 1933-1939, and business did not like or utilize its "freedom...
...Short of stark fear of conquest and annihilation, there is little which could sustain the sacrifices and sorrows of wartime if the public could not be made to believe that "there is a good time coming...
...It has not the chance of the proverbial snowball in the shadow of a half-trillion dollar national debt, prospective bonus payments twice the size of the total cost of our participation in the first World War, regular veteran payments annually equal to the pre-New Deal budget, and innumerable other expenditures which the postwar period will force on whatever party controls us...
...One is somewhat surprised, if he looks for logic, to find Mr...
...The industrial transition from war to peace was little more orderly or satisfactory...
...The only regret that one could have about the book by Dr...
...MOBILIZING FOR ABUNDANCE, by Robert R. Nathan...
...There is no danger that a wistful public will go to libraries and learn that wars are far more prone to bring hell than a windfall of luck...
...Whittlesey House...
...Mock has been a most helpful debunker of myth and a clarifier of public vision...
...Reviewed by Harry Elmer Barnes ONE of the mainstays of war, a leading shot-in-the arm for bolstering and sustaining war morale, is the fable that war is bound to bring better times, that Utopia invariably trails Mars...
...It did not get much of anywhere because the plans were often contradictory, just as they are right now...
...There is more planning, but not more in proportion to the increased volume and gravity of postwar problems...
...Chaos, unemployment, misery, disillusionment, and crime resulted...
...But he does not mean it any more than do the monopoly lads...
...He has published two very useful books on the war propaganda and mythology of the first World War...
...Facing the general situation and outlook after this war, Mock and Thurber point out that the prospect is no more rosy than in 1918-1939...
...The latter had tough going under the best circumstances...
...because there was no central authority to carry out plans, any more than there is today...
...There was no systematic plan to get jobs for soldiers mustered out of service...
...World War II, or at least our entry into it, killed the goose that laid the golden eggs of New Deal economics...
...This may be too bad...
...It is chiefly an account of the propaganda and mythology which proclaimed that a new and better world would follow World War I. Though the title would indicate that it is only a study of utopia-mongering versus demobilization realities in the first World War, it is broader than this, for it deals with mobilizing the nation for war in 1917-1918 as well as demobilizing it out of war...
...Just like the advance shock troops of the Cartel Blitzboys of today, Mr...
...Within reasonable limitations, this doctrine was fairly sound in a prosperous and solvent economy...
...Too much disturbance took place even in the best instances, and the situation of the "war baby" town was tragic in the extreme...
...Nathan launches his program for a postwar rainbow-end by lustily boosting free enterprise...
...But that was all before the war...
...They were already off on the "bender...
...Mock and Miss Thurber is that it was not published in 1938, to deflate the utopia-mongers of succeeding years who helped on the war psychology by portraying the blessed things that would follow in the wake of carnage...
...But we told them all about that back in 1939-1941...
...We will surely get a New Deal after the war...
...Mock and Miss Thurber show that, on the contrary, there was plenty of planning back in those days...
...The New Deal and boys like Robert Nathan are today not unlike a carefree young multi-millionaire who has gone on a long "binge," wasted all his funds on gambling spas and thrifty cuties, contracted de-lerium tremens, and then awakened in a Rescue Mission, thinking that nothing has happened—at least nothing more than a hangover that will be readily dissipated by a dash of bromo-seltzer in the form of a 20th Century Aladdin's lamp, rubbed by John Maynard Keynes...
...Nathan asserting that our wartime production proves the vitality and efficiency of free business enterprise...
...If, as now seems quite likely, we go into the postwar situation under the auspices of a resurgence of individualism, economic reaction, and vindictiveness— with a violently anti-New Deal attitude—the chances are that we will have widespread chaos and suffering which may provoke civil war and are extremely likely to lead to the triumph of native fascism, * * * Robert Nathan is one of the younger and certainly one of the more brilliant of the New Deal bureaucrats of optimistic vintage—an apostle of the Keynes-Han-sen brand of sophisticated Brewster's Millions economic ideology—the notion that we can - spend ourselves rich...
...The present volume is another in his salutary sanitary services...
...Before 1939, the ideology of Mordecai Ezekiel in his $2500 a Year was far sounder than the ideology of Tom La-mont or Tom Girdler...
...The implication is that there was no planning for demobilization in 1918-1919...
...Nathan argues that, after the war, government will just supervise business so as to give it greater opportunity to function freely...
...The optimists of our day admit that things were pretty bad after the last war, but they assure us that this will not happen again because we are now planning to take care of everything in an orderly and efficient fashion...
...Especially when the New Deal is less coherent, dynamic, and clearheaded, and when the hatred of it and its personnel is tenfold greater than it was in 1939...
...What hope is there that business will react differently to government direction after the war...
...Since the public can be trusted to be innocent of history, since even professional historians can learn little or nothing from history, the myth is safe from scrutiny...
...Rather, it proves how much more efficient business is when directed by public agencies...
...The blue ribbon exhibit of free enterprise, or what passes for it in our time, was the economy of 1925 to 1933...
...At least, it was sounder that the fusion of pseudo-miserliness, lottery, larceny, and famine which constitute the orthodox capitalistic ideology and practice...
...But it will not be a reincarnation of the Old "New Deal," operated by men like Robert Nathan...
Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 20
