LESS GUFF, PLEASE, AND A FEW MORE FACTS!
Moses, Robert
Less Guff, Please, And A Few More Facts! By ROBERT MOSES EDITOR'S NOTE: The Progressive does not concur in all of Mr. Moses' judgments, but finds hie plea for facts a refreshing challenge to a...
...The objectives of the global lady were good, but the evidence brought te their support was to say the least extraordinary...
...There was another statement to the effect that the Versailles Treaty reservations voted on by the Senate in 1920 were all obstructive, malicious, and cunningly devised to wreck the Treaty as well as the Covenant, and that they were opposed by all but the reactionary Republicans led by the diabolical Sen...
...He proved to be pleasant, amusing, and very casual...
...Wilson at the door of the sickroom, and that no one, unless it be Mrs...
...The sponsor of these pamphlets apparently could name only 3 of the 15 reservations...
...The President announced recently that his program will employ 6© million people here after the war...
...The words and devices so familiar to us mean nothing to them...
...I pointed out that this statement also was essentially false...
...It dawned on me that he was on a junketing expedition and that his errand was not serious...
...It gives out just what was put in, and all the impersonality and other safeguards may obscure but they never alter this fact...
...And while we are on the subject of the ballot, consider for a moment the profound comment of William Graham Sumner, greatest of all our Yale teachers of the social sciences: "There is no alchemy in the ballot-box...
...There was a chorus of denial, but the Encyclopedia quickly proved that this was the fact and that the statement in the pamphlet was false...
...Secretary Wallace promptly rushed in to paint the lily, pile on the gold leaf, and otherwise adorn and embellish what the slightest examination will prove to be nothing more than a phony slogan to bewilder the public...
...You get out of the ballot, as Billy Sumner said, just what you put into it...
...Every sane man and woman knows there must be a dizzy drop in Government expenditures after the war, and a gradual conversion to private enterprise...
...It is not unreasonable and impractical, however, to insist that facts be established...
...He said, "I just came to New York to get a lot of terminology and a few facts...
...Not long ago a group of educated, supposedly intelligent, and certainly fairly influential people were sitting around discussing the postwar world...
...There was the usual staccato accompaniment of epithets characterizing any non-conformist who might have strayed in as a reactionary, Bourbon, isolationist, America Firster, and stick-in-the-mud...
...Most people who are supposed to know what they are talking and writing about do not take the slightest pains to study history, verify quotations, check statements, see that analogies are really analogous or concern themselves with the principles of logic and the barest decencies of debate...
...Of this war expenditure, close to 100 billion dollars was for strictly war purposes, involving some 30 million of all those employed...
...Employment in that year was at a peak of about 33 millions...
...House or his agent to Mrs...
...Finally I asked him point-blank whether this was so...
...Neither have the Balkan peoples...
...One of the pamphlets stated that World War II was the logical result of our refusal to join the League of Nations and the World Court...
...I pointed out that the statement as to the World Court was not a fact, that we had joined formally by the means provided in the Constitution at the instance of President Coolidge in 1926, and had thereafter been officially represented on the Court since that year...
...A Discount In Debate Anyone who looks at the figures with the slightest comprehension will therefore realize that if immediately after the end of the war we can arrive at a national income of 120 billion dollars and employment of 42 million people, we shall have achieved something altogether extraordinary...
...In 1943 we reached an all-time national income high, due to war expenditures, of about 148 billions, and employment, including service in the armed forces and war industries, reached the dizzy peak of 50 millions...
...Some Common Fallacies Let me give an illustration from the global field...
...NOT long ago the mayor of a nearby city sent a representative to New York to study and report on plans for physical improvements of various kinds on which we were then working...
...Not one of the authorities present knew that the stiff-necked, arrogant Sen...
...Before proving it I tried to find out how many of those present knew anything about the reservations or amendments...
...There is, of course, no way of preventing unfair and uninformed debate and of controlling the meanderings of cute minds trained in sophistry...
...Now all this is the veriest claptrap...
...I have heard and read endless discussions on the question of postwar employment before and after dinner, on public occasions and private, in the press, over the radio, in books, pamphlets, letters and by every means used to disseminate what passes for knowledge...
...Is it to be wondered at that the public is in a daze on this subject after it has listened to equally irresponsible figures from both New Deal and ultra conservative sources...
...No doubt the makers of our American voting machines would be delighted to install their products in East Prussia and Transylvania, from Kashmir to the Deccan, and among millions of Chinese quite unaccustomed to democratic processes, but it will take a century of education to make these things work...
...She did not have the faintest idea what the Shantung reservation was, and apparently assumed that it was a trick which the Republicans were playing on China...
...The visiting fireman had me on his list...
...Poland never saw such a vote...
...Let me give another example of the prevailing practice of making loose statements as to facts...
...I have never forgotten it because it fits so many situations...
...Supposedly conservative businessmen and bankers added to the con- fusion by announcing that white 60 million is too high, we might by taking all strings and restrictions off business and leaving the whole thing to private enterprise and unbeatable Yankee ingenuity, employ from 52 to 54 million people...
...At Yalta the Poles and others were promised free elections supervised among others by Russia, which has never known anything remotely approaching universal suffrage exercised through an honest secret ballot...
...Another illustration from the foreign field...
...His reply was a classic...
...Lodge...
...Since Pearl Harbor in our consideration of vital public questions we have been treated to an endless amount of terminology and a very few facts...
...As a believer in democracy, I am convinced that in the long run, given the facts, the people will be right—but it does not follow that every vote is the voice of God...
...A lady, who shall be nameless, passed around some circulars of an organization which advocated the Dumbarton Oaks program, insisted upon complete cooperation by the United States in all world affairs, surrender of sovereignty to whatever extent it might be necessary to conserve peace, etc...
...Wilson, to this day knows whether the ailing President ever saw the document...
...I pointed out that the Shantung reservation proposed in the Senate had for its only purpose a declaration that the seizure of this area by the Japanese was not to be condoned by the League and frozen into the Treaty, and that the reservations, singly and individually, were approved by an overwhelming majority of the Senate including Democratic Senators devoted to President Wilson, but were voted down as part of the Treaty as the result of a message from Wilson to the Democrats...
...If within 5 or 6 years after the war we can reach a national income of 148 billions and an employment of 50 millions, it will be an economic miracle...
...I plead therefore for less guff, less professional optimism, less fanaticism, less intolerance of the opinions of those who don't happen to agree with you, less resort to silly slogans, fewer appeals to mob spirit and to vociferous minorities, and above all less terminology and a few more facts...
...Lodge had risen above his prejudices to offer a compromise on the reservations, that a memorandum making this offer was sent to the President, that it was delivered by Col...
...There is much glib talk here about self determination of small nations, popular elections, referendums, plebiscites, and what-not...
...It transmutes no base metal into gold...
...Many a debate would be shorter, more intelligible, and much more conclusive if at the beginning or in advance, the facts on which the contestants propose to rely were stated and verified, or if at the end or within a few days later, the moderator or some other impartial person were authorized to expose all misstatements of fact, so that thereafter at least the public could discount further unreliable pronouncements from the same sources...
...Moses' judgments, but finds hie plea for facts a refreshing challenge to a nation saturated with slogans, propaganda, half-truths, and downright distortions...
...Our national income before the war only once reached a figure as high as 97 billions...
...Even these results can not be done without considerable expenditures for public works which, by the way, are anathema to most businessmen, even if such expenditures involve urgently needed repairs and expenditures for improvements like roads which are indispensable to private enterprise...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 16
