Too Much Secrecy
Donald Rogers, who used to be the financial editor of the New York Herald-Tribune, would like to be the leader of a crusade. But unfortunately only a few straggling platoons have formed behind him. There is a promise in the air of a bigger army, but it is only a promise, and we should not delude ourselves into thinking the crusade is about to burst into full swing.
In a fighting book, The End of Free Enterprise (Doubleday, $3.95), Mr. Rogers explains the nature of his crusade. It is to persuade American business to take a vastly augmented responsibility for re-creating a climate of opinion in the United States that will be favorable to the retention and expansion of a voluntaristic enterprise system. Having stated his desires and his hopes, Mr. Rogers then turns to and lets American capitalists have it right in the solar plexus for what he considers is their failure to understand the philosophical bases of the system which they profess to support.
Mr. Rogers’ troubles began when he made a supposedly off-the-record speech to a group of business executives at a Washington, D.C., “round table.” Part of his speech was devoted to criticizing those executives for failure to throw at least some of their advertising to publishing media that still continued to fight socialistic and Big Government trends. As he tried to tell the executives, business has a responsibility to maintain a healthy competitive social climate as well as a responsibility to its sales departments and its dividend-hungry stockholders.
He wasn’t asking the businessmen to boycott “liberal” newspapers and magazines of large circulation which are admittedly the best advertising media when it comes to marketing widgets, gadgets, and buy-now-pay-later trips around the world. But he did think it shortsighted of the executives to let struggling pro-business journals go down the drain for lack of “institutional” advertising nourishment. Without a thriving pro-business press, the institution of the free market is in danger of being enfeebled, and with its enfeeblement the sales of widgets, gadgets, and trips around the world would automatically shrink.
The Secret Is Out
Mr. Rogers’ “secret” speech didn’t remain secret for very long. A memorandum designed for executives who couldn’t attend the meeting fell into the hands of Barry Goldwater, who was so impressed with it that he had it printed in the Congressional Record. Next, Human Events printed it and offered reprints. Then it appeared in Vital Speeches. Altogether, two million copies of it have been made and distributed. The “left,” of course, yelled that Mr. Rogers was trying to interfere with the editorial integrity of great newspapers by advocating that “advertising pressures” be brought to bear on them. Mr. Rogers retorted that people have the right to use their money as they see fit, and that a businessman owes it to his stockholders to try to buy a healthy business climate just as much as he owes it to them to sell goods. But the retort was drowned out by the chorus from the “left.” His own paper disclaimed responsibility for his views, and the business community remained silent when he was forced to quit his job.
Mr. Rogers is not a bitter man, but all of this has left him a bit piqued, to say the least. In The End of Free Enterprise he accuses the business community of timidity and of failing to understand its own predicament. He wonders why businessmen subsidize committees which underwrite the distribution of textbooks that advocate Marxian tax policies and super-Keynesian spending programs. He criticizes businessmen for giving big donations and bequests to universities whose economic and political “science” departments are against the free enterprise system. He wonders why the money spent on “public relations” by business buys so little in terms of fostering a salubrious competitive climate. Discussing the efforts of the General Electric Company to defend its right under the First Amendment to explain its wage policies to union members, Mr. Rogers wonders where the other big corporations were when the National Labor Relations Board attempted to silence GE. The GE fight was their fight, too, he says, but only the Chrysler Corporation seemed to realize it.
Above all, Mr. Rogers criticizes business for failure to anticipate the government in attempting to solve problems of unemployment, “technological illiteracy,” and so on. He says the “public relations” of business “does not relate.”
NAM Program Provides Help for Drop-Outs
Much of what Mr. Rogers says about business timidity is all too true. But some things have been changing recently. The National Association of Manufacturers, which Mr. Rogers criticizes for following bland policies calculated to offend nobody, has recently decided to run its own pilot programs designed to make high school dropouts employable. The NAM has been picking delinquent kids off the streets of Harlem, giving them intensive schooling, and getting them jobs when they prove themselves capable of handling them. The NAM cannot wipe out the problem of the “unemployables” all by itself, but it hopes to “sell” its drop-out education program to business organizations in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Peoria. At last reports the NAM idea had been taken up by some Chicago industrialists. There is no reason why business should not train its own personnel, and many of our dropouts are good material.
Mr. Rogers thinks the members of the American Medical Association had Federal Medicare thrust upon them because they were on the freight train when it came to proposing practical voluntary alternatives to Medicare. He notes that the doctors did come up with an “eleventh-hour” alternative, but by this time Congress had decided to act for itself. “The lesson,” says Mr. Rogers, “is this: If you don’t meet all of the needs as they develop, the government will.” Thus he serves notice on the AMA to forestall a Federal adventure in providing “kiddie-care” by coming up with a voluntary kiddie care plan that will make Congressional action unnecessary.
The Independent Sector
Finally, Mr. Rogers criticizes business for not being more nimble in telling its own great story. Businessmen, as he points out, have created and conducted United Funds all over the country, which “have kept the Federal government and even the local governments out of much of the welfare business.” Business has donated millions to the private colleges and universities. Its support of the arts has actually been prodigious. It has provided “medical insurance for employees to such an extent that the government has never even considered medical aid for the workingman.”
All of this has been part and parcel of preserving an atmosphere of voluntarism that enables free enterprise to flourish. But the professional public relations experts whom business employs to tell its story haven’t dramatized the actual accomplishments of what Richard Cornuelle calls the “independent sector” in meeting social needs.
Mr. Rogers’ criticisms of the business community are offered in a constructive mood. The man is a friend of business. He is tired of seeing businessmen blush and stammer when they are called “buccaneers.” Frankly, Mr. Rogers likes buccaneers; he only wishes we had a few more of them around.
THE MOST OF MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966, 367 pp., $5.95)
Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton
The subjects of this sparkling collection of short pieces by the British critic run the gamut from Kennedyism, pornography, and the Christian churches to credulity, Shakespeare, and the BBC; and from the pen of this free-swinging journalist they make for delightful reading.
Just where MM stands in the political spectrum is not clear from the book under review; considering the swipes at Mr. Goldwater and the late Senator Joe McCarthy, he is certainly not a member of what is called in our country the “radical right.” But then he turns his guns on Lord Snow, the Fabians, and the admirers of Joe Stalin and the Russian Revolution. The value of a fellow like Muggeridge is his willingness to speak out disinterestedly against any and all men whenever, in his opinion, they err grievously. He has not sold himself to a party or to an ideology; like H. L. Mencken, he spares no one.
What will endear Muggeridge to all enemies of modern “liberal” orthodoxy is his unceasing assault on its underlying premise: the idea that man is really a good sort, you know, nothing wrong with him that a better environment and all that won’t take care of nicely.
Muggeridge — on the side of the angels here, if not elsewhere —comes out strongly for the good Christian doctrine that man is a flawed creature who falls far short of perfection. “To proclaim a kingdom of heaven on earth,” writes Muggeridge, “is both deceptive and intrinsically absurd. The maintenance of such a notion requires mental gymnastics so extreme and so strenuous that they usually produce dementia.”
Since all men and all human institutions are imperfect, none is beyond criticism: “In a healthy, civilized society everyone and everything should be open to ridicule. Indeed, I would go further and contend that the degree of health and civilization in any given society bears a direct relation to the degree to which this principle operates. Taboos, where humor is concerned, are an admission of doubt, and derive from a sense of weakness and insecurity. The truly religious take no offense when attention is drawn to the absurdity necessarily inherent in the dogmas to which they subscribe and the ceremonies in which they participate. Protests invariably come from the conventionally religious, from the formalists for whom the dogmas and the ceremonies constitute the whole content of their faith. It is the same with politicians. Those who most object to being ridiculed have least confidence in the policies they advocate. It is the same with moralists. If they complain that some cherished principle is blasphemed by the humorous treatment of its application, then it is certain that in their hearts they doubt the principle’s ultimate validity.”
“Worldliness,” Muggeridge writes elsewhere, “is by its nature, a highly romantic attitude; only mystics know how to be skeptical.”
And a “skeptical turn of mind… is induced only by holding fast to truth.”
At a time when so many intellectuals are trying to outdo each other in describing the sartorial splendor of the emperor, it is a great pleasure to read one who with fine humor tells the awful truth. “There is,” declares Muggeridge, “nothing serious under the sun except love of fellow mortals and of God.”
FAULKNER IN THE UNIVERSITY edited by F. L. Gwynn and J. L. Blotner, New York: Vintage Books, 1965, 294 pp., $1.65.
Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton
William Faulkner served as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia from February to June in 1957 and 1958; and this book contains his lectures together with a transcript of the ensuing discussions. “The first attraction of such materials,” Edmund Fuller has written, “is immediacy. We feel a direct communication, the presence of the living person through the spoken word in spontaneous talk. Also we get an insight into the creative process —not the blueprint of a process that would fit anybody else, of course, but the disclosure of how one skilled man worked at his craft.”
Early in his career Faulkner became an idol of avant-garde writers and political “liberals,” but these turned away as they perceived “the essential conservatism latent in his work and specific in his statements.” His stand on the Negro situation, for instance, put him in the doghouse not only with Southern segregationists, but also with Northern radicals who would bring about integration at the point of a gun. Faulkner sympathized with the plight of the Negro, but he was not so sentimental as to think that mere legislation would provide the solution. Rather than force, Faulkner saw persuasion and education as the means to the desired end. He reminded Negroes and their friends that responsibility goes hand in hand with rights, and he reminded his fellow Southerners of their duty to bring an end to the injustices suffered by Negroes in their communities.
Faulkner was strongly opposed to “the mythology that one single individual man is nothing, and can have weight and substance only when organized into the anonymity of a group where he will have surrendered his individual soul for a number.” One best combats collectivism, he said, by resisting the pressures to relinquish individuality. He believed that the “individual is more important than any mass or group he belongs to. That the individual is always more important than any state he belongs to. That the state must never be the master of the individual, it is the servant of the individual. That… to retain that superiority over the state, the individual must be independent of the state, he mustn’t accept gratuity from the state. He mustn’t let the state buy him by pensions or relief or dole or grant of any sort.”
Faulkner, unlike many of his fellow writers, perceived the tragic element in the human situation. Men are often treated pretty roughly by fate, but this is no reason to regard man as a mere pawn in the hands of forces beyond his control. For man does have freedom of choice; he is thus a responsible creature and as such can find meaning in his existence. Man, Faulkner affirmed, will not merely endure; he will prevail.
