FREE ENTERPRISE' TAILORED TO FIT

Coleman, Mcalister

'Free Enterprise' Tailored To Fit By McALISTER COLEMAN Martha's Vineyard, Mass. UP HERE on this little island across the water from Wood's Hole on Cape Cod, I am striding, Cincinnatus-like,...

...I. 6) Of course, like my stiff-necked daughter, there will always be heretics and dissenters in our midst...
...I beg of my readers, therefore, always to remember that if the Court, i.e...
...But sometimes I awaken and listen to the myriad voices of the pinkle-tinks (that's "hyla crucifer" to you off-islanders who are not fortunate enough to read the Vineyard Gazette, greatest of all country weeklies...
...But hold...
...Few who are not in high executive places can understand how wearing it is to have the responsibility for the energetic continuance of an enterprise pressed down upon one's brow from above...
...Until this remodeled, one-room schoolhouse fell into our laps some 12 years back, I had never been completely sympathetic with Alexander Hamilton's suggestion, in his prospectus for making Paterson, N. J., the industrial capital of the United States, that the hard work in the projected mills of that ill-fated scheme be done by "women, and children of tender years...
...UP HERE on this little island across the water from Wood's Hole on Cape Cod, I am striding, Cincinnatus-like, across my rolling half-acre estate, supervising the setting out of a Victory garden by my wife and small fry, who grub around on their hands and knees, while Daddy plays the part of ridin' boss...
...They also want subsidies, domestic Lend-Lease, governmental reduction of rail rates, anti-trust prosecutions—Uncle Sam, can you spare 100 billion...
...It is good to see how the National Association of Manufacturers, the private utility counsellors on public relations, and, for that matter, a great many members of our national Administration, are carrying on in the devout spirit of George F. Baer...
...Gallup, is overwhelmingly against "governmental interference with private enterprise" knows wherefore and is satisfied, there is no more to be said on the subject...
...This goes for dish-washing, garbage removal, and water pumping, as well as gardening...
...For the edification of my help I have read out loud to them the famous letter of the late George F. Baer, President of the mine-owning Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company, who wrote at the time of the great anthracite strike: The NAM Carries On "The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, -but by the Christian gentleman to whom God has given control of the property rights of the" country and upon the successful management of which so much depends...
...The nights are long here, and we retire early, exhausted by our labors in the Vineyard...
...Tle NAM, for example, is currently hiring teams of blood-sweating parsons and other silver-tongued exhorters to go out amongst the war workers and preach to them the good old Gospel of Divine Right Baer...
...They want government help," says the author, "in obtaining private capital with which to buy and work the plants...
...There is considerable grumbling among the hands as to the role which Daddy has been ordained to play, but whenever have the plain people been content with the lot to which a Divine Providence has assigned them...
...So what are the Western free enterprisers howling for...
...Of course the child has no conception of the heavy burdens put upon the backs of management under the present scheme of things...
...And then I wonder about the schizophrenic state of a Western industrialist who wants the Government to keep its dirty nose out of his business—that is, after the Government has set him up in it...
...Here is an article by A. G. Mezerik in the May issue of the Atlantic Monthly telling of the attitude of the West Coast industrialists who hope to escape from their present serfdom to the financial East by hanging onto some of the new plants—steel, aluminum, magnesium, shipbuilding—which the Government had financed for them...
...When I had finished, my 10-year old daughter Ann, contemplating gloomily her blistered palms, asked my wife: "When did God give Daddy control of our property...
...Night after night I pace the floor of this little manse devising ways and means for its carrying on, with the minimum of interference from its top man, knowing full well that the secret of any big executive's success is his ability to delegate details to his subordinates...
...From an agency in Philadelphia there is now being launched a comprehensive advertising campaign explaining how it was never intended by a Divine Providence that the waters of the Tennessee or the Columbia should be harnessed for cheap and abundant power by such wicked bureaucrats as George W. Norris, David Lilienthal, or the late J. D. Ross, but that God had rather in mind the Commonwealth and Southern and the Electric Bond and Share Company, when, on the second day, He said: "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters...
...the Court of Public Opinion, which, according to the polls of Mr...
...Now, of course, I appreciate how necessary for a proper division of labor under a "free enterprise" system it is that men like myself of a by no means tender age should not be bothered by such small concerns as hoeing, shoveling, and troweling but should be left free to enterprise along executive and supervisory lines...
...Yet there is not enough Western capital lying around to buy these plants from us, the people...
...Mezerik...
...Gen...
...And if they still persist in their errors, our answer to them must be the answer made by the Boston magistrates to that spiritual ancestress of Ann's —Ann Hutchison, whom they were banishing from the colony: "Say no more, the Court knows wherefore and is satisfied...
...With these we must reason until they see the errors of their ways...
...It is suggested that postwar V loans be made to these haters of governmental interference "by which the Government would guarantee the stock and bond issues floated by the (private) company or its bankers to the public...
...Best emulate my example and put on the Cincinnatus act...
...Every Western top-flight industrialist is opposed to government operation of these plants," writes Mr...

Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 21


 
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