A Reviewer’s Notebook – 1969/12

Welfarism and Beyond

Jeffrey St. John, author of Countdown to Chaos: Chicago, 1968: Turning Point in American Politics (Nash Publishing Corp., 9255 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif., $6.95), is among the proph­ets. He has been the bearer of bad tidings, predicting the Yippie polit­icalizing of the Hippie movement, and telling us of the leftist cam­paign to substitute street brawl­ing for Constitutional legislative procedures, long before any of it happened. But he also has his con­structive side: he hopes to turn the forthcoming 200th anniversary of the Republic which is coming up in 1976, into a real celebration of the philosophy of the Founding Fathers, which included a prin­cipled acceptance of libertarian economics as well as the politics of limited government and sepa­ration of the powers.

In its opening chapters Count­down to Chaos deals with the news in a special way, seeking to deter­mine the continuity of Leftist planning that connects such things as the Democratic 1968 convention week in Chicago with what had gone before it and what has come out of it. It was a fortnight before the Students for a Democratic So­ciety and the Yippies had de­scended on Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago that Mr. St. John, in col­laboration with Williamson Good, told Barron’s Financial Weekly subscribers precisely what was go­ing to happen on the Chicago streets during the convention.

The whole thing had been set in motion early in 1966 with the for­mation of a Chicago Project Com­mittee by the National Mobiliza­tion Committee Against the War in Vietnam, headed by a middle-aged radical named David Del­linger. Rennard (or Rennie) Davis, a chief planner for something called the Center for Radical Re­search, was put in charge of the Project Committee. Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Demo­cratic Society, and Jerry Rubin, the creator of the Yippies, both of whom had collaborated on the march on the Pentagon in 1967, threw in their lot with Dellinger and Davis, and a meeting was held in March of 1968 at an unsuspecting YMCA camp in northern Il­linois to coordinate plans for mov­ing the members of some eighty-five Leftist organizations to Chi­cago for the “battle of the cen­tury” against Mayor Daley’s “pigs” and, incidentally, the whole American political process.

In brief, Chicago was anything but spontaneous, even though the “political riot” attracted many in­nocent youngsters who had put in appearance just because they felt it the “in thing” to do to “make the scene.”

If the media had really tried to get at the truth of what happened in Chicago, there would have been no need for Mr. St. John’s recapit­ulation of events. But the TV cov­erage, as was perhaps inevitable, zeroed in on violence with no at­tempt to explain its genesis. What we got from the news media was an unmotivated story. We saw the police “reacting” to events; we learned nothing very much about the long-planned provocation de­signed to turn the week of the Chi­cago Democratic Convention into the opening salvo in a revolution­ary war.

Mr. St. John is an excellent re­porter who tried to delve below the surface of immediate happen­ings. But he is much more than a reporter; he is also a student of liberty in the Leonard Read sense. The second half of his book takes an unexpected turn when he makes the announcement that “regular Democrats and Republicans have no idea of the real aim of the New Left.” The Convention Week events in Chicago of 1968, he tries to tell the “regulars” of both parties, were “part of an attempt, such as that in Germany in the 1920′s and 1930′s, to carry the country beyond the welfare state.” And with this Mr. St. John is off into a description of how the wel­fare state becomes a “bridgehead to the police state.”

Mr. St. John is worried about certain historical parallels. Quot­ing Dr. Leonard Peikoff of Brook­lyn College, he notes that the pe­riod of the German welfare state under Bismarck and the coming to power of Hitler and National Socialism was “roughly forty-five years.” The period spanning the birth date of the New Deal in 1933 to the “violence and dis­orders” of the Democratic 1968 Convention is “roughly thirty-five years.” More ominous still, in Mr. St. John’s opinion, is the collapse of latter-day Liberalism (not really Liberalism) in the 1960′s and the emergence of a New Left radicalism similar to that which engulfed Europe prior to both World Wars. The New Left an­archists echo the syndicalist Sorel on violence; the hippies recall the Vandervogel German youth of the Weimar Republic who dressed in nonconformist clothing, strummed guitars, and moaned around their camp fires that the “older genera­tion would not let them be `free’.”

Far from making them happy, the welfare state and the “mixed economy” encourage the young in their contempt for the whole sub­ject of economics. The need for savings is not understood when a minimum is seemingly guaranteed without regard to one’s contribu­tion to production. Mr. St. John notes that the appearance of the “mixed economy” and the welfare state was followed by dictatorship in Russia and Poland (1917), Italy (1922), Spain (1923), Turkey (1923), Chile (1927), Greece (1928), Japan (1929), Brazil (1930), the Dominican Re­public (1930), Argentina (1931), Guatemala (1932), Uruguay (1933), Austria (1933), Germany (1933) and Mexico (1934). In all cases the retreat from capitalism was followed by an abandonment of democratic government.

Mr. St. John quotes Hayek: “It is now often said that democracy will not tolerate ‘capitalism.’ If `capitalism’ means… a competi­tive system based on private prop­erty, it is far more important to realize that only within the system is democracy possible.” No doubt a certain amount of state wel­farism can be tolerated for a time in the richer nations without a relapse into dictatorship. But the attrition of democracy begins when enough people, responding to the demagogues, begin demanding more from the central government than is compatible with maintain­ing a rate of savings sufficient to keep production expanding as the population itself increases. Infla­tion and taxation, the source of welfare funds, require compulsion to make them acceptable. And, as Hayek has said, “the worst gets on top,” for only the “worst” is willing to use the clubs that are necessary to compel the producers to yield what ought to be regarded as the seed corn for future crops.

To save the U.S. from the anti­capitalist “counterrevolution” that began in the nineteen thirties, Mr. St. John suggests that we insti­tute an “Age of Reform and Re­peal.” In 1976, he says, “we will observe the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.” Unfortunately the plans for celebrating the anni­versary are not taking off from the individualism of the Founding Fathers. The Boston Bicentennial Commission, says Mr. St. John, “is stressing the Liberal and left-wing premise of ‘interdepend­ence’… and completely ignores the affirmative aspects—and the very existence of the American Revolution and of the subsequent Industrial and Technological Rev­olutions.” And the Philadelphia Bicentennial Commission will have a hard time commemorating the Founders’ principles if former Democratic Senator Joseph Clark, an enemy of the original doctrine of the separation of the powers, uses his membership on the Com­mission to put forward his own anti-Federalist point of view.

As a description of the events leading to the “political riot” at Chicago Mr. St. John’s book is first-rate. But its greater im­portance may derive from its in­sistence that we revive our old traditions in preparation for the 200th anniversary of the Republic that will be here before we know it.

THE TRUTH ABOUT BOUL­WARISM by Lemuel R. Boulware (Washington, D.C.: The Bureau of National Affairs, 1969, $7.50 cloth, $2.85 paperback. 190 pp.)

Reviewed by Edmund A. Opitz

Pioneer investigators of electrical phenomena are memorialized by the terms in which later genera­tions discuss the science. Every time we talk about amperes, ohms, volts, and watts we pay tribute to A. M. Ampere, G. S. Ohm, Alessan­dro Volta, and James Watt. It seems fitting, therefore, that a new approach to industrial relations should turn up in the elec­trical industry as “boulwarism,” after Lem Boulware, now retired from General Electric.

The term boulwarism was coined as an epithet; it is now part of the vocabulary as a label for the ef­forts of a business or industry to fill voluntarily its five-fold obliga­tion to: Employees, Customers, Shareholders, the Community, and Government. For General Electric this involved an extensive program of education which began in 1947, under Mr. Boulware’s direction. So successful was this operation that General Electric suffered little from the union problems which plagued other industries. The un­ions gave us the word when they blamed their failure on “boulwar­ism.”

Precisely what did Mr. Boul­ware do? The book under review tells the story in broad outline and it reproduces some of the messages and illustrations used in company publications at the time. Simply, the campaign was designed to tell the story of how the business sys­tem operates, the nature of the free market, and the limited role of government. The story of how this was done has been admirably told here, making this book a handy manual for people in personnel work as well as a lively account of an important incident in business history.