MERRIAM'S TESTAMENT TO DEFEAT
Hamilton, Walton
Merriam's Testament To Defeat PUBLIC AND PRIVATE GOVERNMENT, by Charles Edward Merriam. Yale University Press. $1.75. Reviewed by Walton Hamilton CHARLES MERRIAM was once a young man in search...
...But a chance to be useful came—and the seeker became Alderman Merriam...
...As he had become an authority on government, he felt less and less need to study the subject...
...For years he had professed moral philosophy at Oxford...
...Crowns are no longer gold but tinsel...
...a parade of phrases—juristic positivism, optimum operational results, pathology of organization, man-as-an-org—sound awesome depths...
...Merriam could learn from a great British scholar I once heard pontificate...
...It tells, it is true, little more than the obvious about public government...
...Many kind things are said about an evasive democracy, alike precious and amorphous...
...What seems to be granite is sometimes found to be putty...
...Then the academic statesman, once more in command, adds the saving proviso—"unless God and nature exercise their constitutional veto upon my intentions...
...that minds must never be allowed to become bold...
...But remember that the truths presented are untainted by reality and too refined for vulgar use...
...It is a little unfair for Merriam to saddle his failure to produce that great book on nature or on nature's God...
...The Merriam idiom — omnipresent in all his work — lends distinction to this book...
...You learn from its pages that "in a world of order which outlaws war, nations are not permitted to attack at will...
...Reviewed by Walton Hamilton CHARLES MERRIAM was once a young man in search of truth...
...and after all these years people now "discount your promise...
...Absolutism is an evil we wish to avoid...
...allusions to TVA, Fascism, the Four Freedoms, give evidence of being right up-to-date...
...such is their power that only the natural hell-raiser ever lifts up his voice in protest...
...He taught others how to find out—even at the expense of having little time to learn the art himself...
...to the Union League mind and in whooping it up for a pie-in-the-sky sort of international accord...
...A touch of pleasantry at the beginning...
...For this very reason the book is significant...
...reference to Hobbes, Rousseau, Bodin, Gierke, attest the higher learning...
...There can not be power without danger of the abuse of power...
...Who else could serve up so pretentiously eternal verities such as these...
...Such nuggets of pure gold can be gleaned almost at random...
...In this book the key to the great mystery is to be found...
...In an unequal struggle greatness has won...
...And a greater chance to turn learning to account seemed to impend—and the idealist did not become Mayor Merriam of Chicago...
...A series of footnotes, held modestly within the limits of good taste, mark the well-read man...
...So destiny decreed that he should become an academic statesman...
...A casual mention of a-score-of-theories-I-have-stud-ied proclaims the right to speak...
...And its contribution to an understanding of private government is nil...
...they were not, like the judgments of the court, open to informed discussion...
...The discourse, pivoted upon such mysteries as Areas of Conflict, Fear of Power, Sovereignty, and Groupism— moves upon a level above mortal reach...
...Their like has not appeared since W. S. Gilbert in Pinafore scribbled, "Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream...
...IF I HAVE failed to convey the importance of Merriam's book, my pencil has betrayed me...
...Some future historian, puzzled over the inability of our strange age to direct the forces of change will chance upon this book as a priceless document...
...One reads on and on and on, yet never overtakes the idea which seems forever to be just over the top of the next page...
...Their articles of faith demand that inquiry shall be solid, remote, and respectable...
...At a time when the separation of state and economy is ending, when great industrial empires decree their own legal codes, when corporate fictions divest business of loyalty to country, when as never before private government is usurping the function of the state itself, you would never get from this polite essay a glimmer of what is going on...
...Sovereign nations do not lose by association with other nations...
...For many years it was assumed that when the great American work on politics was written, Charles Merriam would write it...
...IT IS a superb art—able to turn any stuff at hand into verbal currency that will pass...
...a slight, ever so slight, touch of condescension...
...He and his kind have fixed the formulas by which young men are to quest for truths and yet get ahead...
...His office in the critical era between two wars was that of impresario of research...
...that the color of life, the drama of conflict, the clash of controversy are to be avoided...
...an atmosphere of the urbane...
...They did not even suspect...
...So let us hope that the Deity gets in his injunction ; for some mean person is certain to use the magnum opus to blast'at a great reputation...
...Nowhere else is the intellectual sterility with which we meet the challenge of a new social order so pathetically shown...
...A little over two cents a page makes the price of the book a little steep for us readers of The Progressive...
...But rarely if ever in history has such blindness been shown towards what was going on...
...For the author, and all his highly placed kind, did not have the question...
...You can, across the decades, see him reaching for the typewriter to scribble, "A society rushing into the unknown cannot have the answers...
...An adventure into semantics plays amfably with ponderous words—and leaves them undefined...
...Government is the tool of the common good...
...In a curious preface—which tells far more than was ever intended—youth reminds success of personal tragedy...
...Dark deeds have been done in the name of religion...
...but a vestige of a belief in honest inquiry still flickers...
...But his tomes—this is not his best—demonstrate that the man is vastly more important than anything he has to say...
...So all loyal Oxonians could forever say, "It is true that he has never written a book...
...an attitude of speaking with authority, yet intimately and kindly, are here...
...given advice to foundations, told agencies of state how to do it...
...but, if he had written a book, what a book it would have been...
...In an heroic line, in which he tries to recapture the zest that once was, the man replies, "the paper will be redeemed...
...Its sublime achievements are in saying "tut...
...Their decisions are spread on no public records...
...Here is a man who has directed research, helped universities to shape their policies...
...To attain eminence a man must have a way with him...
...And just think how much of jargon and of platitude a nickel will buy...
...And a hush of expectancy broods over the whole affair...
...yet he never allowed the truths he had discovered to find their way into print...
...He was left on the campus, but had learned to manipulate men...
...And Gilbert speaks for Merriam as well as himself as he concludes, "I could go on like this forever...
...The liberalism of the onward and upward, as ardent as it is aimless, is sported throughout...
...For here we catch the mentality which, through a great cartel of learning, imposed the hand of paralysis upon the pursuit of knowledge...
...Says an inner voice, feeble but not quite stilled, your "larger work on Systematic Politics," planned in 1907, has not yet appeared...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 30
