J\lA Y 4. 1953 25¢

Nullification by TreatyThe Threat to Your Constitutional Rights

Caret Carrett

Was Bohlen ~l Blunder?James Burnham

Agony of the Welfare StateLudwig von Mises

Peronism at BayEudocio Ravines

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THE

reemanEditor

Managing Editor

A Fortnightly

For

Individualists

HENRY HAZLITT

FWRENCE NORTON

Our ContributorsGARET GARRETT, who has written for variousNew York newspapers, including the New YorkSun, the New York Times, and the Wall StreetJournal, was chief editorial writer for the Sat­urday Evening Post, and more recently editorof American Affairs. He is the author of nu­merous books, essays, and articles on finance,economics, and politics.

Editorials

The Fortnight 0 0 0 0 • 0 0 0 •••• 0 0 •••• 0 ••• 0 •• 0 0 • 0 0 0 •• 545The Korea-Formosa Leak .. 0 0 0 0 0 ••••••• 0 0 0 0 •• 0 0 •• 0 0 • 0 546The Kremlin Itself Confesses .. 0' ••••••••••••• 0 •••••• 0 547Wonders of World Wheat. o. 0 0 0 ••• 0 0 .000. 0 ••• 0 o •• 0 000 548

Contents VOL. 3, N'O. 16 MAY 4, 1953JAMES BURNHAM is well known to our readersboth for his frequent articles in the FREEMAN,

and his much quoted books on Communism andthe strategy we should adopt in opposing it, ofwhich the most recent is Containrnent or Lib­eration, published in February of this year.

LUDWIG VON MISES is a well-known contributorto the FREEMAN on economic and political ques­tions.

Articles

Nullification by Treaty. 0 • 0 ••••• 0 • 0 ••• 0 • 0 GARET GARRETT 549Was Bohlen a Blunder? o •• 0 • 0 •• JAMES BURNHAM 551Agony of the W'elfare State LUDWIG VON MISES 555Peronism at Bay 0 • 0 0 • 0 0 EUDOCIO RAVINES 558Decline of the Rule of Law, Part 2.0 ..•• 0. of. A. HAYEK 561Thorez Comes Home ..... 0 0 • 0 0 • 0 •••• 0 EUGENE TILLINGER 564

Books and the ArtsMan as a Promise 0 •••••• 0 0 0 MAX EASTMAN 567A Problem in Psychology 0 •• 0 ••• 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 R. A. PARKER 568Young Heroes ..... '0' 0 0 •••••• o' •• 0 0 0 HELEN WOODWARD 569Deep-Damasked Wing 0 ••••••••• 0 ••• 0 •• E. MERRILL ROOT 570Romulo-Voice of Asia ..... 0 • 0 0 0 •• 0 • 0 •• SERGE FLIEGERS 571Timely Reappraisal. 0 • 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ••• 0 0 0 • 0 • 0 • 0 0 FREDA UTLEY 572Television .. 0 0 •• - •••••• 0 •• 0 0 • 0 0 •••••• 0 0 0 • KAPPO PHELAN 573

Poems

To My Father ... 0 0 0 ••••••••••• 0 ••• 0 0 0 RUTH PICKERING 554Agenda 0 • 0 •• 0 0 •• 0 •••••• 0 •••• 0 •• CANDACE T. STEVENSON 563Amen 0 •••• 0 • 0 ••• 0 0 0 0 •••••••••••••••••• WITTER BYNNER 566

From ()ur }leaders 0 ••••• 000 •• 0 •• 00 •••• 0" 0 0 ••• 544

Worth Hearing Again '0 0 ••••••••• 0 ••• 0 ••••••• o. 557

This Is Wbat They Said......... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 566

THE FREEMAN is published fortnightly. Publication Offtce, Orange, Conn. Editorial andGeneral Offices, 240 Madison Avenue, New York 16, N. Y. Copyrighted in the UnitedStates, 1953, by the Freeman Magazine, Inc. Henry Hazlitt, President; LawrenceFertig, Vice President; Claude Robinson, Secretary; Kurt Lassen, Treasurer.

Entered as second class matter at the Post Office at Orange, Conn. Rates: Twenty-fivecents the copy; five dollars a year in the United States; nine dollars for two years;six dollars a year elsewhere.

The editors can not be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts unless return postage or,better, a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed.

Articles signed with a name, pseudonym, or initials do not necessarily represent theopinion of the editors, either as to substance or style.

~ Printed in U.S.A., by Wilson H. Lee Co., Orange, Connecticut.

EUDOCIO RAVINES knows well the innermostworkings of the Communist movement in LatinAmerica, for he was long its mos,t successfulleader. He broke with the party in 1941, and isnow living in exile in Mexico City. His auto­graphical volume, The Yenan Way, was pub­lished by Scribner's in 1951.

F. A. HAYEK conlpletes in this issue his discussionof the rise of the Rule of Law and its subse­quent and recent decline.

EUGENE TILLINGER, foreign correspondent forthe North American Newspaper Alliance, hasjus,t returned from four months in France andWestern Europe.

R. A. PARKER, biographer, critic, and columnist,has condueted extensive research into contem­porary cults and myths.

E. MERRILL ROOT, the distinguished poet, haspublished six volumes of verse and severalprose works. He is Professor of English atE'arlham College, Richmond, Indiana.

FREDA UTLEY returned in January from an ex­tended stay in Germany, where she collectedmaterial for a number of articles and a bookin progress. A regular contributor to the FREE­

MAN, her most recent article was "Germany'sDilemma," in our issue of March 9.

A Note to SubscribersNotification of change of address should includeboth the old and the new address, and shouldbe sent to: Circulation Department, the FREE­

MAN, 240 Madison Avenue, New York 16, N.Y.Please allow thirty days for the change to be­come effective.

I look forward eagerly to each issueof the FREEMAN - a real Americanmagazine.Rochester, N. Y. INEZ ROBINSON

A Few Words of PraiseCongratulations on your March 23 is­sue. And particularly upon the "NoRich, No Risk-Bearing." EdwardHunter's "Government by the Insane"also was outstanding. And much ap­preciated your Four Horsemen of theKremlin.Washington, D. C. CLIF STRATTON

The People PayIn one of your editorials [March 6,1953] you say: "... The Secretary ofAgriculture's decision to continue thesupport of dairy produc;ts at 90 percent of parity may cost the govern­ment about 100 million dollars in theyear starting April 1."

Did someone slip in your office? ...The point is that nothing costs thegovernment anything;' The cost, what­ever it may be, is paid by individualcitizens and by rio one else. Whetherit be the government, a corporation, atrade union, or any other form of co­operative effort, the cost is alwaysborne by individuals. It is by forget­ting this for a moment, or ten minutes,or an hour, now and again, that menaoting in the name of government orin the name of some other organiza­tion toss heavy burdens on the people.New York, N. Y. MURRAY T. QUIGG

Timely ProtestYou say in your issue of March 9:"What was even more ominous thanthe provisions of the [Yalta] agree­ment wait the absence, at the time ofits publica,tion, of any loud or audibleoutcry or protest."

You are wrong. The Chicago Trib­une's protes1t was as loud as we couldmake it, which is said to be tolerablyloud. What you call "the normalAmerican ability to distinguish be­tween right and wrong, freedom andslavery," was not "badly blurred" inChicago.

Here, for example, are the conclud­ing paragraphs of an editorial ofFebruary 27, 1945:

The scheme concocted at Yalta is,of course, in dIrect violation of theletter and spirit of the AtlanticCharter. It is said that those whodenounced the charter as a confi­dence game at the time it was is­sued have no right now to cite itagainst the Big Three. On the con­trary, when we and others scoffedat the charter it was not because ofthe principles it proclaimed, whichare sound enough, but because itwas evident that neither Mr. Roose­velt nor Mr. Churchill meant toabide by them.

The decision of the Yalta Con­ference proves we were right.

Chicago, Ill. LEON STOLZ

II FROM OUR READERS II

During that period l a phenomenalincrease in industrial productivitypartially overcame the effects ofthe decline in the dollar's real value.As an example - Kennametal, asa tool material, helped increasemetal-working productivity as muohas 300%. Despite these technologicalimprovements real wages droppedfar behind dollar pay.

Friction between management andworkers was inevitable. The con­stant cry for "more money" actuallymeans "for more purchasing power"- to make up for the dollar's defi­ciency. In other words - for soundmoney ...

The Presidentl some of his closeCabinet advisors, members of theSenate and the House have publiclyrecognized the need for a returnto the Gold Coin Standard:*" Why nottake action on it, now?

Return to the Gold Coin Standardwill end the bickering which stemsfrom unsound money' ... will createa healthful business atmospherewhere American industry, of whichKennametal Inc. is a key enterprise,can achieve greater productivity, andprovide more real wages and realbenefits to all our people.

One of a series of advertisements published in the publicinterest by

Why Don'tYou

StabilizeReal Wages

by returning to theGOLD COIN STANDARD?

WORLD'S LARGEST Independent Manufacturer Whose Facilities areDevoted EXclusively to Processing and Application of CEMENTED CARBIDES

Excerpt from Republican"Monetary Policy" Plank

THOSE of us who WO:k for a living­and who doesn't - will be restlessand dissatisfied as long as we arepaid in dollars of uncertain and fluc­tuating value. Making plans ... sav­ing to bring those plans to reality ...seeing dreams come true - these areessential to human contentment andhappiness.

The foundation for security is soundmoney_ There is only one moneywhich fills that description - a med­ium of exchange which is freelyconvertible to gold on demand.

When the government seized thepeople's gold twenty years ago, itwithdrew from its citizens theirpower to control government spend­ing. The· stage was set for waste andcorruption - financed by a·· flood offiat currency which diluted the pur­chasing power of the dollar.

*The right to redeemcurrency for gold willhelp keep Americafree .•• ask your Sen­ators and Congress­man to work and voteto restore the Gold

f:iThs:a~o~~d.S~~~: (, \GOLD"ard League, Latrobe, /Po., for further infor­mation. The League ison association of pa­triotic citizens joinedin the common causeof restoring a soundmonetary system.

THE

reemanMONDAY, MAY 4, 1953

The FortnightOnce more we are learning the consequences forourselves of acting as if any truce' or peace pro­posal from the Communists were made in goodfaith. On April 15 American planes sent up to fol­low the progress of returning prisoners of warhad to fight their way through Communist anti­aircraft fire, only to observe' an enemy build-up ofsupplies for the front all along the roads desig­nated for transporting captives. "Hundreds" oftrucks were reported boldly rolling in daylight onsupply roads that they usually use only under thescreen of darkness. But they bore the agreed mark­ings-large red panels-that immunized them fromattack. The result? 'The next day all the sixty mem­ber states of the United Nations voted in favor ofa resolution expressing the hope that "the furthernegotiations 'at Panmunjom will result in a'chiev­ing an early armistice' in Kore'a."

A mysterious silence has greeted the announce­ment th'at, while the UN is handing over 5,800 sickor wounded prisoners to the Communists in Korea,the Communists have only been a'ble to dig up 600in return, and of the'Se only 120 are Americans.Rear Admiral John C. Daniel, who is handling theexchange, remarked that this seemed an "incrediblysmall" number, and asked the Communists for "amore libeTal interpretation of your definition ofsick and wounded." The refusal was adamant, andAdmiral Daniel reserved the right to make "furthercom'ment" on the enemy figures. That "furthe'rcomment" has so far not been made.

Can it be possible that no one in the Pentagon,and no one in the United Nations, and no one inthe United States Gove'rnment remembers in thisconne'ction the news broken to us on November 15,1951, by Colonel James M. Hanley, Judge AdvocateGeneral of the' Eighth Army, that 3,600 UnitedStates prisoners of war were slaughtered by theNorth Koreans, and another 2,513 by the ChineseCommunists? "A record of killing and bavbarismunique even in the Communist world," was ColonelHanley's phrase for it.

The State Department declined comment, but theDefense Department, stating that Hanley's report,vas released without the knowledge of GeneralRidgway, said that they had cabled the Generalfor clarification. On the following day GeneralRidgway clarified as follows: "Of the 10,836 peT­sons still carried as missing in action ... there isconsiderable evidence to justify a presumption ofdeath by atrocity of a large number which may ap­proxim'ate 6,000."

He remarked by way of mild rebuke that ColonelHanley's duties did not "involve responsibilities forthe reporting of casualties in the Korean opera­tion," but made it clear that the Judge Advocatehad the best possible ace-ess to the' facts. Subse­quently, on November 23, the Defense Department,on the basis of a .report from Gene'ral Ridgway,gave the number of captured United States mili­tary personnel slain by the Communists as 8,000.

We ask again: Can the memories of our militaryand political leaders be so short that they have for­gotten these facts? Is their meek request that theCommunists revise their standards and m'ake a re­count due to pathological forgetfulness? Or arethey, in the interest of a policy of appeasement,ignoring the -ghastly truth implied by the pro­posal of the Communists to return 120 sick andwounded American prisoners in exchange for 5,800prisoners of their own?

And what of our leaders of opinion-the news­paper editors, the columnists, the radio debaters,the news commentators? Is this a case of involun­taryamnesia, the "oblivescence of the disagree­able"? Or is this a conspiracy of silence imposedby the new administration in a continuance of theAcheson-Truman e'ffort to get out of the war inAsia without winning it?

On April 11 former President Herbert Hoovermade the most constructive proposal for de-social­izing electric power that has been put forward byany statesman in the last twenty years. "The ob­jective of the whole proceeding," he explained,

MAY 4,1953 545

"should ,be to get the Federal Government out ofthe business of generating and distributing poweras soon as possi'ble." Mr. Hoover'sexplanation ofwhy his proposal is necessary was no less interest­ing than the proposal itself. He told in hard figuresvlhat twenty years of creeping socialism has meantin the field of Federal electric power. By the' mid­dle of this year, the Federal 'Government will haveaequired a generating 'capacity of about 15,000,000horsepower, 'which is a'bout 12 per cent of theutility generating capacity for sale to the public.The burdens and losses which this change, andfurther programs still afoot, will impose on the'American taxpayer, as Mr. Hoover demonstrated,will run into the ibillions unless the trend is re­versed.

Bureaucrats remain bureaucrats. They miss noopportunity to vent their pro-socialist bias even ifthey serve a Republican State Government. A fineexample was provided by the' New York State In­come Tax Bureau. Its form 201 used to call "Earn­ings" only the compensation received by employees.By implication, all other income, including that re­sulting from the exercise of a prof.ession became"unearned" income. In his essay "Profit and Loss"(reprinted in Planning for Freedom) ProfessorLudwig von Mises referred to this semantic mon­strosity as characteristic of the mentality of thebureaus. His critique has apparently had a sur­prisingly quick ~U'ccess. The' new Income Tax Re­turn f'orm 201 has dropped the offending termi­nology, and no longer reserves the term "Earnings"exc1usively for wages and Sialaries.

Elsewhere in this issue we publish an article byEudocio Ravines on the sinister collaboration nowapparent between Peronism 'and Communism. Thisis in part the result of the complete collapse ofPeron's totalitarian economic policy. One factsymbolizes that collapse' more vividly than anyother. In the modern world the Argentine has beenone of the great sources of the world's 'beef. Todaythere is a ishorta;ge of beef in the Argentine itself.lVleat shipments into the cities have declined to atrickle; hundreds of butcher shops are closed.Peron's economic policy can be deseribed as con­sisting mainly in monetary inflation "suppressed"by price...fixing. The economic dislocations andshortages brought about !by this have been the chiefreason behind the mounting internal opposition toPeron's regime. 'This culminated in the fatal explo­sion of bombs when the dictator was, speaking to acrowd of 100,000 persons in Buenos Aires. Theinte'rnal opposition has 'been 'followed by the arrestof hundreds of merchants for price-ceiling viola­tions and the arrest of scores of others for thecrime of circulating "false and tendentious rumorsof alarming nature." Peron is now fighting for hispolitical Ufe. He can hope to stay in power only byincreasing the violence of his repressions.

546 THE FREEMAN

The Korea-Formosa LeakThe government of the United States considers theRepublic of Korea and the Republic of China asindependent and sovereign nations. It should, wefeel, neither think nor act in a manner that putsthis position in doubt. But it did think and act asif these t,wo governments were ours to hold or dis­card, when the Department of State early thismonth engineered its remarkable leak on possiblefuture policy on Korea -and Formosa.

What happened was this: a number of experi­enced newspapermen, within a few hours of eachother, published Washington dispatches suggestingthat the United States was 'Considering 'a divisionbetween North and South Korea at the peninsula'swaist. The dispatches also said that the futurestatus of Formosa, .seat of the Chinese' government,might be solved by a United Nations trusteeship.

The reporters lwhose dispatches relayed this sup­posed State Department thinking included AnthonyLeviero of the New York Times, Ray Cromley ofthe Wall Street Jo1lrnal, Garnett D. Horner of, the'Vashington Star, and United Features columnist,Marquis Childs.

These and other dispatches were identical inbasic content. Their tenor suggested that they werebased ona calculated State Department leak, atrial baBoon designed to sound out reaction athome and abroad. Bill Costello, White House cor­respondent of the Columbia Broadcasting System,alleged that the dispatches were based on a talkwhich Secretary of State John Foster Dulles hadwith the correspondents. Costello said Mr. Dullesgave the re-porters permission to use his remarks,without attributing them to him and spaced out ina series of dispatches.

When a furor set in, both in Congress and else­where, the White House and State Department de­nied that the dispatches reflected official thinking.The New York Times' Washington bureau chief,Arthur Krock, called the incident "'another instanceof the administration getting its wires crossed andblaming the consequences on the press."

Whoeverlleaked the State Department's mullings­over to the press, there is one thing we just plainlYdon't understand. It is this: What was this leaksupposed to accomplish? We see only that it hasshown our hand to the Moscow and Peiping re­gimes, that it has weakened our 'bargaining powervis-a-vis our Red antagonists.

We should, if any leaking was to be done, havesuggested the' very opposite. We should have saidthat we stood 'by our guns, and that all of Koreashould be freed from Communist control. Weshould have strengthened our bargaining power latthe negotiations, by restating' what we have saidright 'along: that the government of Chiang Kai­shek is the legitimate and recognized governmentof China.

The Kremlin Itself ConfessesOne of the strangest, most bizarre, and most im­portant events in the Soviet Union since the deathof Stalin was the 'abrupt cancelation of the showtrial prepared for "the poisoning doctors." It wasofficially announced last January that nine promi­nent Soviet physicians, of whom six and probablyseven were Jews, had confessed to having mur­dered two well-known ,soviet leaders, AndreiStcherhakov and Andrei Zhdanov, by prescribingincorrect treatment for their aHments.

As has been the case in previous Soviet treason,murder, and sabotage trials, the reach of thesesupposed enemies of the proletariat had exceededtheir grasp. They had unsuccessfully tried to kiH,it was said, leading figures in the Soviet armedforces. They had not acted on their own initiative.They had been taking orders from the J ewish JointDistribution Committee, a well-known Americanphilanthropic organiz'ation, which had acted as aninstrumen t of the American Intelligence Serviceand had instructed the physicians to "destroy theleading eadres of the Soviet Union." No circum­stantial detail was omitted. The go-ibe'tween in thesupposedly sinister doings of the doctors was "thewell-known Jewish bourgeois nationalist, SolomonMikhoels," a famous Soviet actor, murdered undermysterious circumstances several years ago.

The stage setting for a trial designed to pointan anti-American andanti~Semitic moral seemedcomplete. The 'accused had confessed, thereby fullvsatisfying the Owen Lattimores, the Corliss La­monts in Ameriea and their opposite numbers inGreat Britain and France. More than that, 'a med­ical expert commission had confirmed the findingsof the investigation. All that remained, it seemed,"vas to have the physicians produced in court, con­fess their guilt again, and plead for the deathpenalty, which would be quickly meted out to them.

But something slipped in the smooth functioningof totalitarian "justice."· The harassed physiciansthe'mselves probably were in danger of death fromheart failure when they were set free and pro­nounced innocent. An Order of Lenin to a womanphysician who had denounced them was canceled.

And the whole method of extorting the "confes­sions," which for the last two decades have edified.foreign Communist sympathizers and puzzled for­eigners unfamiliar with totalitarian methods, waslaid Ibare with breathtaking frankness in the Com­munist Partyoffi:cial newspaper, Pravda. When aSoviet citizen, brought to public trial, confesses, itis not ne,ws. When a totalitarian state confesses, itis big news, like the man who bites a dog.

"It has been established," 'write'S Pravda, "thatthe testimony of the arrested, allegedly confirming

the charges proffered against them, was obtainedby workers of the investigation section of the for­mer Ministry of State Security through the use ofmethods of investigation whi'ch are inadmissibleand most strictly forbidden by Soviet law."

This is about as clear an admission of the use oftorture as could be imagined. At long last thepower of darkness and of evil, enthroned in Russiasince 1917, so diabolically expert in extracting de­grading confessions from its victims, has itselfconfessed. Who can how take seriously the admis­sions in any political trial ever held in the SovietUnion or in any satellite state?

Suspicious skepticism about these trials wasaroused from the beginning by the strange dis­crepancies in the very sm'all amount of the evidencevlhich could be examined and veTified outside theSoviet frontiers. For example, in one of the firstof these treason and sabota1ge trials, held in 1930,a group of accused engine'ers, headed by ProfessorRamzin, testified that they proposed to set up acounter-revolutionary government, headed by aprewar Moscow industrialist, P. P. Ryabushinsky,with a tsarist Finance Minister,Vishnegradsky, asJ\/Iinisterof Finance. But both Ryabushinsky andVishnegradsky had died in exile years before thesupposed plot took place.

There were similar curious slips, Which the "de­fense" made no effort to expose or emphasize inthe later trials, in which Leon Trotsky, then inexile, was supposedly implicated. One of the de­fendants declared that he had met Trotsky's son,Sedov, in the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen. Butthere was no I-Iotel Bristol; the only hotel of thatname in the Danish capital had been closed in 1917.An the supposed details of the trip of another de­fendant, Pyatakov, to visit Trotsky in Norway, thearrival by airplane, the length of time required toreach Trotsky's place of residence, etc., were ex­posed as apocryphal.

Still more' significant 'was the failure of the So­viet Government,after the Red Army had capturedBerlin, to produce a single piece of corroborativeevidence from Nazi archives to ,bear out the thesisof the purge trials of the thirties: that there hadbeen extensive Nazi plotting with the followers ofTrotsky and high officers in the Red Army.

How confessions are manufactured. in Communistpolitical trials is no secret. There are many inde­pendent witnesses, the former Swiss Communist,Elinor Lipper, the formeT Spanish Communist mili­tary leader, Valentin Gonzales (UEI Campesino"),the forme'r Communist physicist. Alexander Weiss­berg, the Polish lawyer, Z. Stypolkowski, who havedescrIbed their experiences under the notorious

MAY 4, 1953 547

"conveyor" method of interrogation. The principleof this torture is night after night of sleeplessness,aggravated by blinding lights playing on the eye­balls of the victims, and compulsion to sit in a fixedposition, while relays of investigators shout a1buseand badger with repeated questions. The strongestphysical and nervous or,ganism is certain to ibreakunder this system ultimately.

But it is just as well to have Pravda's belatedconfession on file., for reference in the next bigMoscow purge trial. That there will be such a tri'a'lis highly probable. Only a very powerful .figurecould have ordered such an important political stepa.s a public trial of the kind. prepared for the doc­tors. Only an equally powerful figure could havecalled it off, and with such reckless exposure ofthe true methods employed in political trials.

The apparent target of the original frame-upwas Lavrenti Beria, who would have been logicallyconsidered negligent in taking care of state secur­ity if it were established that two successful poison­ing efforts and several unsuccessful one's weremade during his regime. Beria has proved strongenough, for the present, to vindicate his reputationvigorously by discrediting the frame-up. But willthe matter stop there?

A state of acute tension behind the forbiddingwalls of the ancient Kremlin, which witnessed somany revolts, massacre'S, and palace conspiracies inthe time of the old Muscovite tsars, is indicated. Itis unlikely that Moscow has seen its last, or itsbloodiest, purge.

Wonders oj World WheatIf the International Wheat Agreement expireswithout renewal on July 31, it will be, ironicallyenough,because the chief gainer from the' oldagreement, importing Great Britain, has formanyannounced its withdrawal, though the chief loserfrom the old agreement, exporting United States,was willing to signa new agreement for anotherthree years.

When the International Wheat Council was setup in 1949, it was not another ,global plan set up inthe allied afterglow of the Second World War. Itwas not created in the image of the United Nations,or any other hopeful'ly contrived internationalbody. Instead, it was the product or a world-widemarriage of convenience.

The Council 'was supposed to Ibe made up offorty-six nations, four of which were to be majorwheat exporters. 'That would have meant: theUnited ,states, Canada, Australia, Argentina, andthe Soviet Union.

But 'the two dictator-governed countries, Per6n'sArgentina and Stalin's Russia, decided not to jointhe club. If any selling of wheat was being done,Moscowiand Buenos Aires decided, they were going

54:8 THE FREEMAN

to sell to the higheit bidder, and never mind globalwheat bureaucracies.

To stay within the theoretical framework of theCouncil, however, two substitute wheat exporterBhad to be found. And they were found, never fear,although their wheat exporting did not reallyamount to much. 'The choice fell on France andUruguay. However, for all practical purposes, itwas the United States, Canada, iand Australia whowound up on the exporting side.

Looking back, from our non-global Americanpoint of view, it turns out that this deal has costthe United States taxpayer something like $600,­000,000. Because the difference between our domes­tic market price and the wheat agreement maxi­mum had to he paid out of the U. 8. Treasury.

Let us not get high and mighty at this point, andblame it all on the wheat-hungry importing coun­tries. Let us look at the wheat grain in our owneye, and observe that Washington de'Sired the po­litical allegiance of the nation's wheat growers asit made this whole deal,back in 1949.

When the 'global wheat agreement was signedfour years ago, it fixed the maximum price sellerscould charge 'at $1.80 per 'bushel. But the worldprice for wheat has, since then, always been verymuch higher. In the United States, this differencehas been around sixty-three cents per bushel­'\vhich the Trum'an administration paid out as asubsidy.

Truman burdened the Eisenhower administra­tion with a heavy political debt to the wheat farm­ers. The Eisenhower cabinet found itself smackbetween two most unattractive alternatives: to getitse'lf in bad with the 'wheat growers; or keep onpaying subsidies, so that wheat importers couldbuv at the fixed price.

The Eisenhower administration did, as it looksnow, the' politically unavoidable thing. It tried tog'et a compromise. From next July on, the agree­ment maximum will be $2.05 per bushel~hich

would save the taxpayer 'a quarter on each bushel.compared to what was paid out during the pastfour years.

Still, let us keep the record straight. Th~ Inter­national Wheat Agreement represents the kind ofpolitical realism. that undermines economic moral­ity in the long run. Once subsidies start, overpro­duction becomes 'chronic, and 'pressure for moresubsidies is unavoidable. The wheat subsidiesshou;ld :be reduced out of existence. Countries asrich as the oil nations of Saudi Arabia and Vene­zuela can surely. pay the going price of wheat. AndGermany, where we've been sending most of ourwheat, is also able to pay its own way.

While it is well to understand that the TrumanAdministration left the Washington Republicanswith a tricky politieal dilemma, the final goal shouldnot be in doubt: no pay-offs to ,pressure groups, athome or abroad.

Nullification by Treaty

By GARET GARRETTThe Constitutional amendment propo$ed by SenatorBricker ~sessentiaZ if we are to preserve ournational sovereignty and;our rights as Americans.

Now you may see what happens when, after 'aprodigious rise in theexecu'ti've authority of ;gov­ernment, the people put forth their hands to limitit. The State Departmen1t echoes with cries of dis­tress, and the reigning bureaucra'cy, sinking allminor differen'ces, unites to throw a fighting de­f.ense around it. The people are told ,they know notwhat they do. They would we1aken American leader­ship 'in the world 'and perhaps destroy mankind'shope of peace.

Wha't seems now to be the issue?It is this: 8h'all the Constitution be amended to

say that international treaties may not impair thefundamenta'l rights of American citizens, nor strikedown the internal laws of the 'country, without theconsent of Congress?

With that one end in view 'two main proposalsare under debate. One is 'called the Bricker 'amend­ment, sponsored by Mr. Bricker and sixty-threeother senators, and one' is from the American BarAssociation. Since the United Stlates has beenmaking :treaties with fore'ign nations for 'morethan one hundred and fifty years, 'why should any­body think it necessary now to 'amend the Con­stitution in that manner? Because now for thefirs,t time in our history there is rising among usa fanatic men'tiality that holds nationai sovere'i1gntyto be an evil, 'and would use the treaty-m'akingpoweT to overthrow it for the sake of the world.

One of the eminent voice'S e~pressing this stateof 'mind is that of Justice Owen J. Roberts, whoformerly sat on the Supreme Court bench and nowis 'chairman of the Atlantic Union Committee. Ata conference in Ottawa last year he s'aid: "Wemust decide whether we are to stand on the sillyshihboleth, nationa'l sovereignty." We must, he'said, yield our national sovereignty to some "higherauthor'ity---'call it what y'O'uwiH." This call-it-what­you-will would be a super-government of the world,invested with power to make "such economic ad­j ustments 'as are necessary to put the people of allthe member countries on an equai leve1."

TheTe is no way to m'ake all the members of aworld government equal hut to level down America.Mr. Ro'berts, and all who think as he thinks, thatthe superior economic position of this countryshould :be s'Rcrificed to the ideal oia common level,know that wha't they want, or a good deal of it,could be brought to pass by the treaty-makingpower of the President.

Regard, first, the fact that this treaty-makingpower has never, been explicitly defined; secondly,that in the interpretation of the Constitution atthis point the courts have been equivocal. The Con­stitution says (Article VI) that: "This Constitu­tion and the laws of the United States which shaHbe made in pursuance thereof and all treaties ...shall he the supreme law of the land . . . anythingin the Constitution or laws of any state to the con­trary notwithstanding."

That was all right when it was written. Inter­nationall treaties at that time were not political;they touched only such matters as boundaries, navi­gation, fish'ing rights, and maybe migratory birds.The Founding Fathers could not imagine 'a treatythat involved a sa'crifiee of the national sovereignty,a trea1ty thiat infringed the Constitutional rightsof American citizens, nor a treaty that struck downour internal laws. Nor could they have imaginedan Owen J. Roberts.

Clarification Needed

So treaties shall be the supreme law of the land.What are the impli'c1ations of that phrase? Duringthe ye1ars the courts have tried again and 'again tofix the m'eaning of it, and they have never agreed,so that it still means anything the Supreme Courtmay say it means in R speci;fic case. In the mostcelebrated case (Missouri vs. Holland) Mr. JusticeHolmes held th'at an act of Congress, to be the su­preme law of the land, must be consistent with theConstitution, whereas a treaty is the supreme lawof the land if made only under the authority' of theUnited States, whieh means merely the will of thePresiden't, two-thirds of the Senate concurring.

Thus the crucial question is presented. To be thesupreme law of the land, must a treaty be Consti­tutional? Some say yes and some say no, and sohave the courts said, sometimes yes and sometimesno. If you are trusting the Supreme' Court at lastto say yes, you had better look again at the recentsteel seizure case. There was a steel strike. On theground that it put national defense in jeopardy,President Truman seized the steel properties,which he had no Constitutional right to do. Thesteel people appealed to the Supreme Court andthe Supreme Court decided that the President waswrong, but it was a spli't vote. And it was the ChiefJustice himself who argued th;at under the United

MAY 4, 1953 549

Nations Charter, which is an international treaty,the Pres'ident had power to do that which unde'rthe Constitution he was fo~bidden to do. His seizureof the steel properties, therefore, was legal-notunder the Constitution of the United St'ates butunder the Charter of the United Nations. The ChiefJustice, happily, was in the minority, supportedby only t,wo other members of a court of nine.

On this startling record" Frank E. Holman, pastpresident of the American Bar Association, madethe following comment (in a pamphlet entit'led"Dangers of Treaty Law") :

The Chief Justice succeeded in getting two othermembers of the Supreme Court to .join him in thisextraordinary doctrine whereby the UnitedNationsCharter would be superior to the Constitution of theUnited States. If he could have succeeded in gettingtwo additional members of the Supreme Court toside with him, the United States would in effectthen and there have ceased to be an independentRepublic, and we would have been committed andbound by whatever the United Nations does or di­rects us to do. We would have had a full-fledgedworld· government overnight, and this is exactlywhat may happen under so-called Treaty Law unlessa Constitutional amendment is passed proJ;ectingAmerican rights and American law and Americanindependence against the effeQt of United Nationstreaties.

When in the course of change the precise mean­ing of a law comes to be obscured by many inter­pretations and. gets involved in endless legalisticdisputations, the obvious remedy is to clarify it.If the people want the treaty-making power to beconfined by the Constitution, beyond any doubt,let them exercise their sovereign right to say soand amend the Constitution accordingly. Whyshould there 'be any difficulty a'bout it?

State Department Contradicts Itself

The difficulty is, first, that clarific'ation wouldlimit the freedom of the President to make treatiesand a'greements with foreign countries (agree­ments some1times without the consent of the Senateeven though they may be as binding as treaties),and, secondly, that ,a condition of dimness is veryfavorable to the extension of the executive au­thority of government. It becomes, therefore, thebusiness. of the' State Department not only to de­fend di'mness but to enlarge its area. To that endit issued, among other pieces, a propaganda paperentitled: "Questions and Ans'wers on the UnitedNations 'Charter, the 'Genocide Convention and theProposed Covenant on Human Rights."

Question No. 22: "Are the Constitution andAmerican liherties in jeopardy from the conventionsand treaties flowing from United Nations or'gans?"

The ansiwer was :"No. . . . The treaty-makingpower does not extend so far 'as to authorize whatthe Constitution fo~bids."

What flatly contradi'cts the State Department onthis point? Well, 'among others, the Ohief Justiceof the8upreme Court and two of his colIea1gues on

550 THE FREEMAN

the Supreme Court bench-in the steel seizure case.While the State Department was giving wide

circulation to that piece of propaganda" John Fos­ter Dulles, addressing the members of a bar asso­ciation in LouisvHle, Kentucky, April, 1952, 'said:

The tre,aty-making power is an extraordinarypower liable to abuse. Treaties are more supremethan ordinary law, for Congressional laws are in­valid if they do not conform to the Constitution,whereas treaty laws can over-ride the Constitution.Treaties can take powers away from the Congressand give them to the President. They can take pow­ers away from the states and gi~e them to the Fed­eral government or to some international body. Theycan cut across the rights given to the people by theConstitutional Bill of Rights.

Constitutional Amend.ment Opposed

Now John Foster Dulles is Secretary of Stateand responsible for State Department policy. Inthat capacity he appears before the Judiciary Com­mittee of the Senate. He does not retract the wordshe uttered at Louis'ville, nor does he disavow theState Department's propaganda piece, which, ac­cording to those words, was false. N'evertheless, hestands with the emha'ttled hureaucr'acy of the StateDepartment. He defends the dimness in which itlikes to work. He is against any amendment of theConstitution that would limit the freedom of thePresident to make tre'aties and agreements withforeign countries-a'gainst it at 'leas,t for thepresen't.

On wh1at does he rest this illogical position?On the grounds, namely, that President Eisen­

howe'r can be trusted not to abuse the treaty­making power, that more than some other Presi­dents he will share it with the Senate, that he issympathetic to the idea of clarification.

For marginal illumination read in the New YorkTimes, April 8, 1953, an editorial entitled "Path­way to Ch'aos." It s'ays:

The Bvicker resolution to hobble the treaty-makingpowers of the United State~ is unnecessary, unwise,and dangerous.... The resolution is dangerous be­cause it forbids any treaty that would allow anyforeign power or any international organization(meaning the U.N. or one of its agencies) to controlthe Constitutional rights of Ameri,can citizens withinthe United States or any other matter essentiallywithin the domestic jurisdiction of the United States.Such a fantastic proposition could hamstring ourparticipation in all sorts of international agenciesthat are of world-wide benefit.

Fantastic to propose to limit the executive powerof government only so far as to say that it shallnot surrender to any foreign or international powerthe Constitutional rights of the Ameriean citizen!The editorial adds: "It is i'mposs'ible to avoid theconclusion that wh1at Mr. Bricke'r is really doing isstriking a blow for the isolationists against fullAmerican participation in the United N'ations."

National sovereignty, avaunt!

Was Bohlen a Blunder?By JAMES BURNHAM

This step-by-step account of the events culminatingin the confirmation of our ne~v envoy to Moscow raisesst,artling qu,etStions that areinthe.mt8elves an answer.

1. Shortly after the election, Secretary of State­to-be Dulles asked three retired and respected dip­lomats-Joseph Grew, Norman Armour, and HughGibson-to serve as a committee to sift State De­part1ment appointments. On January 26" Dulles toldthis committee that he had decided to name CharIe'SE. Bohlen Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Sub­sequently, Messrs. Grew and Armour stated theirendorsement of this choice. Mr. Gibson, who wasnot Requainted with Mr. Bohlen, felt thereby dis­qualified from expressing a positive opinion, but hewas willing to go along with the judgment of hiscolleagues.

2. News of the planned appointment soon spread.On February 23, notice was taken of it during theHouse debate over the abortive "Yalta resolution."Representative' Thaddeus M. Ma'Chrowicz, an anti­A1cheson Democrat, while criticizing the failure ofthe White House text to include a repudiation ofYalta, mentioned the "slated" appointment, andremarked: "It will confuse the people behind theIron Curtain."

On February 27, the executive's nomination ofCharles E. Bohle'll, "Foreign Service officer of theclass of career minister," was suhmitted to theSenate for confirm!ation.. Although there was noindieation at this point that the nomination wouldbe openly opposed, two things were already clear:first, that most Democratic senators, including allwho had consistently supported the Acheson for­eign policy, were pleased; se-cond, that all Repub­lican senators (except Senator Morse, who on thatdate still sat on the Republiean side) were unhappy.Senator Taft summed up what was apparently thoiniti1al attitude of most of the Republicans when hosaid that he was not enthusiastic about the nomi­nation but that it was a relatively minor question.not worth fighting over. It was aS'sumed that thopill, though bitter, would be quickly and quietlyswallowed.

3. On March 2, the Committee on Foreign Rela­tions, under the chairm'anship of Sen1ator WHey,met in executive session to question the nominele.The proceedings failed to bring joy to the he~arts

of the Committee's Republican majority. The nextmorning's Baltimore Sun headlined its story onthe session: "Boh'len Backs Yalta Pacts and Tru­man Foreign Policy. Choice as S0viet Envoy also

Defends Acheson at Senate Group Hearing." Thisprecis, though a little too blunt to cover the syntaxof a diplomat, was on the whole confirmed by thetext when it was made publi'C three weeks later.

The committee put many questions to the nomi­nee concerning the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdamconferences, at all three of which Bohlen was offi­cially present. He did not attend, he said, as a"policy-maker." Bohlen's de'finition of this phraseis strict. On March 18 he explained to the Commit­tee that "nobody is in a policy-making position inthe Department of State except the Secretary ofState or the Acting Secretary." When, however,the friendly Senator Green tried to help him out ofa difficult spot during the March 2 questioning byurging that "he acted simply as interpreter" atYalta, Bohlen was quick with his rejection: "Sena­tor, might I s'ay this, that I was also an assist'antto the Secretary of State at Yalta, and I had a cer­tain advisory capacity. . . ."

With respe'ct to the Yalta agreements, the am­bass;ador-designate found nothing wrong from a1945 perspective. In 1953, by "hindsight" and "inretrospect," he suggested two possible "valid cri­ticisms" of the Far Eastern agreement: "First, itvIas unnecessary; ... secondly, it was done with­out the participation of the Chinese Government."These two points are', in Mr. Bohlen's opinion.minor, impossible to have noticed at the time, andwithout "influence on what has hiappened in China."

As for the European agreements made' at Yalta(and Teheran and Potsdam), Mr. Bohlen had nocritici'sm of any kind, even by hindsight. In spiteof Senator Ferguson's almost begging him to putsome qualifying phrase into the record, or at leastsom'ething neutral a la professional technician,Bohlen declined to say a word against the treat­ment of Poland, for example, in the Yalta agree­m,ents, or the provisions for forcible repatriationof Soviet citizens.

"SENATOR FERGUSON. As you s'ay now, hindsightmakes YaUa and these other agreements look likea great mistake.

"MR. BOHLEN. I would not say that, sir, for theones that were relating to Europe. . . .

"SENATOR FERGUSON. You claim now ... thatthese agreements were correct governmental agree­ments so far as America was concerned, but thatthe interpretation put on them by Russia is whathas C'aused the . . .

MAY 4,1953 551

"MR. BOHLEN. 1 would say, sir" I would go furtherthan that; s'aying ... it is not so much interpreta­tion as violation...•

"SENATOR FERGUSON. Why did We' have to sur­render the rights or these people and be a party tothe surrender?

"MR. BOHLEN. I don't consider that the agree­ment at Yalta involved a surrender. It involvedthe opposite."

It was left for Senator Hubert Humphrey togive the only warm welcome: "I think the Presi­dent's choice of you as Ambassador to the SovietUnion is exce'llent. . . . Thank God we have gotpeople in the Government who will take the atti­tude of forbearance, of honor, particularly in deal­ing with these great conferences, such as youhave."

4. Shortly after the March 2 hearing, a closedmeeting of the Republic-an PoHcy Committee washeld. Senator Styles Bridges declared, as he waslater to do on the Senate floor, that he alone hadvoted against confirmation of Dean Acheson asSecretary of State, and that he would vote, againalone if necessary, against confirmation of Ache'­son's disciple, Charles E. Bohlen, as Ambassadorto Moscow. With this declaration, the quiet swal­lowing of the pill was over. -Now' each man wouldhave to be counted, and an open dispute be'cameinevitable.

5. With the chance for routine approval thusgone, a pro-Bohlen publicity campaign had to bemounted. Leadership was assumed by the pressand commentators that belong to what is oftencaned the. "liberal" or "internationalist" wing of"early" Eisenhower supporters: that is to say,those who in general supported the Acheson for­eign policy, but who, reaching the conclusion thatAcheson and Truman had become discredited, havehoped that Eisenhower would continue the old pol­icy unde'r new labels and auspices. The New YorkTimes, the Washington Post, and columnists likeWalter Lippmann and the Alsop brothers werevigorous in the Bohlen campaign. Behind them wasprobahly the bulk of the press, at least in the East.

Guerrilla action, in which the salvoes of thevVashington Times-Herald were the most conspicu­ous and telling, countered irregularly from theother side.

6. On March 13, exactly midway between Boh­len's nomination and confirmation, there took placean unreported incident which, a1lthough it has .nodirect relation to the Bohlen affair, is a clue intracing the political pattern of which that affair isa part.

O. K. Armstrong was formerly a Representative'from MissourLHe did not run for re-election lastNovember, though he campaigned actively for hisparty. Politically, he was associated in Congress

552 THE FREEMAN

with Charles Kersten, author of the "KerstenA'mendment" to the Mutual Security Act. Alongwith Kers,ten, Walter Judd, and a few others, O. K.Armstrong was conspi'cuous in the House as a firmor "hard" anti-Communist" one who w'as consist­ently ready to initiate or support anti-Communistand anti-Soviet actions.

Armstrong had be'en, or thought he had been,promised an important job in the Department ofState. Even before the inauguration, in fact, thisprospect had been publicized, and Armstrong hadtaken part in prtblic _funC'tions as an official-to-be.His expectation was favored by a group of con­gressmen 'and senators, most of whom are alsoknown to one or another degree for conscious andlong-term anti-Communism. These congressmen hadalso 'submitted in the appropriate quarters a list offifteen or twenty additional names of informedanti....Communists who they thought would be usefulrecruits for a revivified State Department andrelated agencies.

Somehow, week after week, the Armstrong ap­pointment never came definitely through, and noneof the other names got anywhere at all. On March13 a luncheon was held to put the cards on thetable. A dozen or so congressmen and senators (notall Republicans), including-Karl Mundt, Joe M·artin,W'alter Judd, Charles Kersten, and Dewey Shortmet with Secretary Dulles and Assistant SecretaryMcCardle.

The result was una'mbiguous. The members ofCongress were informed that Armstrong was notgoing to get the job (unless he wanted to acceptan insignificant post), and that none of those onthe list and no one like them was going to get jobs"at this time."

7. On lVlarch 18, a new actor in our little dramamade his public entrance. His opening lines werefunneled through the mask of James Reston's col­umn in the New York Times:

"John Foster Dulles," spoke the megaphone,"now has reached the point where he must choosebetween defying the McCarthy-McCarran-Bridge'saxis in the Senate or losing -the confidence of themen who work for him in the Foreign Se'rvice andthe State Department..••

"... If he takes anything except a strong positionfor Mr. Bohlen-even if he quibbles about it--hisprestige among the men who must administer hispolicy here and overseas will suffer. . .. Withouttheir respect and support, he cannot operate effec­tively."

In a word: blackmail. The' controlling upperstratum of the "career Foreign Service," formedunder the New Denl-FairDea'l dispensation andstill adhering to its international principles, thedefenders of John Stewart Service and EdmundClubb and John Carter Vincent and John Davies;as of Alger Hiss in his day-these nonpolitic'altechnicians threaten, through Reston's voice, to

sabotage the foreign policy of their government iftheir boy doesn't get the blue riibbon.

8. Me'anwhile increasing talk was heard about apossible "security problem." A security problem,with its mysterious "file" which no mortal manseems ever actually to see-or perhaps rather toadmit· seeing---.:is always difficult and always un­pleas'ant. Yet it is not altogether surprising thatsome senators became during the' course of theBohlen affair concerned over security.

Senator WHey reported on March 18 to theForeign Relations Committee that t,wo days beforehe had requested a summary of the State Depart­nlent security file on Bohlen. "My office, however,was called by the State Department and advisedthat for all intents and purposes there' was nosecurity file on Mr. Bohlen because there had neverbeen an investigation made of him. It seemed tome very strange indeed that a man who hadoccupied confidential positions in the departmentof the highest magnitude for over two decadesshould not even have had an ele'mentary loyalty andsecurity check." It seems strange to the rest of us,too, I think, particularly when we' rec'aH some of

Mr. Bohlen's former colleagues who were also longuninvestigated during those two decades.

It further developed that no FBI "field investiga­tion" had ever been made of Mr. Bohlen until ~

'hurry-up call for one came in connection with thisnomination.

The usual legal precision of the' Secretary ofState's language seemed to break down somewhaton this rough point of se'curity. "I received a dayago a summary of the report of the' FBI," he toldthe Com:mittee. "There is no derogatory materialwh'atsoever whieh questions the loyalty of Mr.Bohlen to the United States, or which suggeststhat he is nota good security risk." But a little'further on, indirecNy confirming Senator McCar­ran's statement to the Senate-so hotly denouncedin the press-that Scott McLeod, the Department'snew chief security officer, had not "cleared" Boh1en,the testimony reads:

"SENATOR HICKENLOOPER. Has your security office'.cleared this file for loyalty and security?

"SECRETARY DULLES. No. I told you that he[McLeod] said that in view of the fact that thjsfile contained some derogatory infor'mation, he didnot wish to take the responsibility of clearance."

Was there or was there not "derogatory mate­rial"? Senator McC'arthy was given the customarytreatment for saying there were sixteen pages ofit. But Senator Morse, ardently pro-Bohlen, re­ferred first to "two or three," then to Hsix or seven,"and finally to "fifteen derogatory reports" as beingin "the :file'."

As for the favorable material in the file, the onlyofficial word we have about it is also from SecretaryDulle's: "The approving evidence has not been sum­marized except by a long list of distinguished

people who gave a complete clearance, and ex­pressed high approval of Mr. Bohlen." To someminds, after the disiUusionments of recent years,there is something not funy convincing any moreabout these lists of distinguished approving people.

Well, it is hard for the ordinary citizen to knowwhat to make of all this. In any case, the securityissue here was resolved and dismissed. SenatorsTaft and Sparkman were appointed to examine thefile. On the twenty-fifth, they reported back. Itturned out that they. had not been able to carrythrough their exact mission. Taft observed that he"thought we should see' the raw file." They did notdo so. They, along with Mr. Herman Phleger, thedepartment's legal adviser, looked over the sum­mary. But they declared that they were satisfied,and the matter was then dropped.

All in all this was no doubt a good thing. In theBohlen affair, the security issue was partly a diver­sion. With it put aside, the basic meaning of theaffair-the' political meaning, that is-had to befaced unadorned.

9. The small chance that the White House mightwithdraw the nomination evaporated on the twenty­sixth. "The President," said the New York Times'summary of his remarks, "had listened to Mr.Bohlen's philosophy and so far as the Presidentcould see the nominee was the best qualified manfor the Moscow post who could be found, and thatwas the reason his name was sent to the Senateand that was the refason it was staying there."

10. So, on the tiwenty-fifth and the t'wenty-sev­enth, the Senate went to the heart of the matter.

Senator Taft himself, with his usual parliamen­tary tact, said little. It was for Senator Wiley asChairman of the Foreign Relations Committee tomotivate the decision which was, of course, also.Taft's and ,vhich was sure to prevail. For bothmen, as for many others, the "constitutional ques­tjon" was prominent. "The President," Senator'Viley affirmed, "is entitled to have the men of hischoice as his representatives" if there are no "over­riding" reasons to the contrary. Testimony indi­cated that the nominee was technically "qualified,""secure," and loyal. Therefore' the Senate shouldconfirm. Both Taft and Wiley were thinking also,we may be sure, of the unity and future of theirparty, and of the nation's as well as the party'sinterest that there should not arise a bridgelessgap between the new Congress and the new WhiteHouse.

'These considerations are very weighty. Who hasdiscove'red a balance delicate enough to testmechanically a complex political decision?

No RepubHcan senator praised, 01'" even defended,the politic-al substance of the nomination. SenatorI{nowland honestly recorded his doubts. "If I hadhad," he said, "the poweT of appointment, which Idid not have, very likely I would have selected

MAY 4, 1953 553

someone else. But that is not the question beforethe Senate." Senator Hendricksen admitted that he'would be voting Aye "with some reluctance."Senator Watkin's Aye would be "in nowise approv­ing all of [Bohlen's] views on foreign policy andhis arguments made before the Foreign RelationsCommittee." Senator Ferguson's speech was a longcritique of Yalta, but his pained vote was also Aye.

Eleven Republican senators and two Democrats,a number unprecedented on such an issue so earlyin a new Administration, judged that politicalsubstance had to be put above protocol and partyregularity.

Senator McCarthy had declared earlieor that how­ever the security question was settled, "I wouldstill oppose his nomination, because I think weshould not promote' those in this Administrationwho were part and parcel and heart of the Achesondisastrous, suicidal foreign-policy group." On thet'vventy-fifth, Senator Bridges spoke at length. "Itwas my belief," he summed up, "that in November,1952, the American people repudiated the Truman­Acheson foreign policy.... By confirming Bohlen,we put the seal of approval on the sellout of Poland.... Like Acheson, he stood by his friend AlgerlIiss. . . . He is a partisan, an active partis'an ofthe foreign policy of the Truman-Acheson wing ofthe Democratic Party...."

On the twenty-seventh, Senator Dirksen spokeagainst confirmation with good humor and firmness.I-Ierman Welker, Freshman Senator from Idaho,unashamedly· troubiled that he was compelled to votein opposition to the President whom he so muchadmired and for whom he had campaigned so hard,said quite simply: "I have a duty to perform ... Icame to the U. S. Senate weH-nigh solely becauseI had campaigned against the foreign policy of theprior Administration. I campaigned against DeanAcheson, against the Yalta agreement. . . . I couldnot return to my home state and say that I votedto confirm the nomination of a man who still justi­fies and defends Yalta."

And then, in his direct Idaho way, he burst theargument by which the nomination had been chieflydefended-that Bohlen is "uniquely qualified" forthe Moscow post: "The only person that we couldthink of who was qualified to play that role,"Secretary Dulles had on the eighteenth gone so faras to say. "I am no authority," Senator Welkeradmitted, "on career diplomats. I have met onlyone, a man by the na;me of Loy Henderson, whomI ,admire very much. I wonder why he was notchosen from the career service to be sent to Moscow,because he impressed me, and many others, as. aman who would be feared by Communists and whovvould fight them down to the last ditch."

Well wondered, Senator! And you might haveadded that Loy Henderson, too, "speaks Russian"~if that is really a necessary quaUfication--and hasseen· his apprentice years of service in the SoviettTnion. Your impression that he would be feared by

554 THE FREEMAN

Communists and would fight them was shared bythose who surely ought to know, by the Communiststhemselves. Igor Bogolepov, an official of the SovietForeign Office when Henderson-and also CharlesBohlen-were in Moscow, has testified that hisSoviet superiors rated Loy Henderson alone on theAmerican Embassy staff of those days as "hostile."

Then, as a member of a party which in its elec­toral campaign had called for a dynamic policy ofliberation, Senator Welker asked: "What is thethinking of millions upon millions of captive peoplebehind the Iron Curtain today, when they see arepresentative of the State Department who satin at all those meetings go into one of the mostcrucial positions in the world? Does it give themhope? Does it give them faith for the future? Ithink not, Mr. President."

The Democratic senators quite naturally satback. It was not their headache. But as in theForeign Relations Committee hearing, so in thefinal Senate debate, it did not seem decorous thata vote should be taken without a word of genuinepraise for the candidate. As Humphrey had felt itnecessary to speak in the Committee, so did SenatorHe~bert Lehman on the Senate floor. The lastwords before the business of the tally were his.

"I shall vote for theconfirm'ation of the nomina­tion of Charles E. Bohlen," he said without reserva­tion, "because I think nothing has been shown savethat he has been a loyal, honest, devoted, and goodpublic servant of his country."

With this, the Senate voted 74-13 to confirm.

11. So from this modest summary of the file, thequestion almost unavoidably arises: Why did aRepublican President, with a fresh mandate fromhis people, name Gharles E. Bohlen to such a postat such a time? What is the portent? What purposecans for Bohlen and none other?

To My FatherBe not abashed before the glittering trainOf angels wa'lking slowly calmly by,But pluck the angel's skirt most seeming shyAnd lead her down some friendly glareless lane;Describe your vineyards whi'tening in the rain,Your wheat-blown gold in June when 'winds are high.No Siweets for you are hid in heavenly sky;For you ,thecricket's song must tril'la'gain.

An angel's heart wi'll waken at your wayOf smiling. Galling others she will say:"Eternal wonder stirs this simple soul;For him our knowledge is 'an empty scroll;For him the daily joys of earth suffice;Return him to his dearer paradise."

RUTIi PICKERING

Agony of the Welfare State

By LUDWIG VON· MISES

It can play for its handouts and its deficitsonly by seizing .the funds of the wealthy­but it has already exhausted them, and mustnow tax the supposed beneficiaries themselves.

For about a hundred ye'ars the Communists andinterventionists of all shades have been indefatig­able in predicting the impending final collapse ofcapitalism. While their prophecies have' not cometrue, the world today has to face the agony of themuch glorified policies of the Welfare State.

The guiding principles of the Welfare State werebest laid down by Ferdinand Lassalle, both thefriend and rival of Marx. Lassalle ridiculed theliberal doctrines. They assigned to the state, heremarked sneeringly, only the functions of a nightwatchman. In his eyes the state (with a capita'l S)was God and Santa Claus at the same time. Thestate had inexhausti,ble funds at its disposal, whichcould freely be used to make all citizens prospe'rousand happy. The state should nationalize big busi­ness, underwrite projects for the realization ofwhich private capital was not available, redistributenational income, and provide for everyone securityfrom the cradle to the grave.

For Bismarck 'and his professorial henchmen,deadly foes of "Anglo-Saxon" freedom as theywere, this program was the consummation of thehistorical mission of the Hohenzollern dynasty aswell as of the social gospel of a new Christianity.Sozialpolitik provided a common ground for theco-operation of churchmen and atheists, of royal­ists and republicans, of nationalists and inter­nationalists. They were all united in the fightagainst the alleged inhumanities of capitalism,which had ,multiplied population figures and raisedthe average standard of living to an unprecedentedheight.

The new German policy was soon enthusiasticallypraised by British Fabianism, and later adopted byall European nations and by the United States.

The Welfare school communicated to mankindthe tidings that the philosophers' stone had finallybeen found. Self-styled "new economics" dismissedas palpable nonsense what "orthodox" economicshad said about the alleged nature-given limitationof useful goods and resources and the consequentnecessity of saving and progressive capital ac­cumulation. Th0re is, they shouted, abundance;poverty is merely the outcome of bad policies fa­voring the selfish interests of the few at the ex­pense of the many.

If the interventionist says the state should do(and pay for) this or that, he is fully aware of the

fact that the state does not own any funds butthose which it collects as taxes from citizens. Hisidea is to let the government tax away the greaterpart of the income and of the capital of the wealthycitizens and to spend this revenue for the benefitof the majority of the people. The riches of thenabobs are considered inexhaustible, and so, con­sequently, are the funds of the government. Thereis no need to be stingy in matters of public expen­diture. What may appear as waste in the affairs ofindividual citizens, is, when we consider the na­tion's budget, a means of creating jobs and pro­moting welfare.

Let the Rich Pay

Under the impact of such doctrines the systemof progressive tax rates was carried to extremes.But then finally the myth of the inexhaustiblenessof the wealth of the rich had to evaporate. Thepoliticians were perplexed when they discoveredthat they had reached the limit. Several years ago,Mr. Hugh Gaitskell, head of the British Treasuryin the socialist cabinet of Mr. Attlee, had to admit"that there is not enough money to take away fromEngland's rich to raise the standard of living anyfurther." The same is true for all other nations. Inthis country even if all taxable income of thoseearning more than $25,000 were confiscated, theadditional income to the government would amountto much less than $1,000,000,000, a trifle whencompared with a budget of $78,000,000,000 and athreatened deficit of $10,000,000,000. The house ofcards built by the "new economics" is crashing.

Politics seemed to be a very simple thing in theselast decades. The main task of a politician was toinduce the government to spend more and more.Subsidies, public works, new offices with hosts ofemployees, ,and many other costly things securedpopularity and votes. Let them, Le., the rich, pay.But now their funds are spent. Henceforth thefunds of the beneficiaries themselves will have tobe tapped if more handouts are to be made to them.

The statist philosophy considers the entrepreneura useless idler who skims the cream from industrywithout performing any corresponding economicservice. The nationalization of business merelyabolishes the unj ustified privileges of ,parasiticdrones. A salaried public servant does the jobs pre-

MA Y 4, 1953 5 5 5

viously assigned to the businessman .much moreefficiently and much more cheaply. The expropria­tion of private ownership is especially urgent inthe field of public utilities.

Guided by these principles, the governments ofthe various European countries long ago national­ized the railroads, the telephone and the telegraph,and many other branches of business. The resultwas catastrophic: scandalously ,poor service, highrates, yearly incre'asing deficits that have to becovered out of budgetary allowances.

Derailment of State Railroads

The financial embarrassment of the main Euro­pean countries is predominantly caused by thebankruptcy of the nationalized public utilitie'S. Thedeficit of these enterprises is incurable. A furtherrise in their rates would bring about a drop intotal net proceeds. The traffic could not bear it.Daily experience proves clearly to everybody butthe most bigoted fanatics of socialism that govern­mental management is inefficient and wasteful. Butit is impossible to sell these enterprises back toprivate capital because the threat of a new expro­priation by a later government would deter poten­tial buyers.

In a capitalist country the railroads and thetelegraph and telephone companies pay considerabletaxes. In the countries of the mixed-economy theiryearly losses are a heavy drain upon the nation'spurse. They are not taxpayers, but taxeaters.

Under the conditions of today, the nationalizedpublic utilities of Europe are not merely feastingon taxes paid by the citizens of their own country;they are also living at the expense of the Americantaxpayer. A considerable part of the foreign-aidbillions is s'wallowed by the deficits of Europe'snationalization experiments. If the United Stateshad nationalized the American railroads,and hadnot only to forego the taxes that the companiespaY,but, in addition, to covereve'ry year a deficit ofseveral billions, it would not have been in a positionto indemnify the European countries for the fool­ishness of their own socialization policies. So whatis postponing the obvious collapse of the WelfareState in Europe is merely the fact that the UnitedStates has been slow and ",backward" in adoptingthe principles of the new economics: it has not na­tionalized railroads, telephone, .and telegraph.

Yet A'mericans who want to study the effects ofpublic ownership of transit systems are not forcedto visit Europe. Some of the nation's largest cities-among them Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, SanFrancisco-provide' them with ample material. Themost instructive' case, however, is that of the NewYork City subways.

New York City subways are only a local transitsystem. In many technological ,and financial re­spects, however, they by far surpass the nationalrailroad sy,stems of many countries. As everybody

55(; THE FREEMAN

knows, their operation results every year in a tre­mendous de,ficit. The financial management accumu­lates operating de,ficits which it is planned to fundby the issuance of serial bonds. Only a municipalityof the bigness, wealth, and prestige of New Yorkcould venture on such a policy. With a private cor­poration financial analysts would apply a ratherugly word to its procedures. No s,ane investor wouldbuy bonds of a private corporation run on such abasis.

Incorrigible socialists are, of course, not at allalarmed. "Why sholJ,ld a subway pay?" they areasking. "The' schools, the hospitals, the police donot pay; there is no reason why it should be dif­ferent with a transit 'System."

This "why" is really remarkable. As if the prob­lem were to find an answer to a why and not to awherefrom.

There is always this socialist prepossession withthe idea that the "rich" can be endlessly soaked.The sad f.act, however, is that there is not enoughleft to fill the bottomless barrels of the' publictreasury. Precisely because the schools, the hos­pitals, and the police are very expensive-, the citycannot bear the SUbway deficit. If it ,wants to levya special tax to subsidize the subway, it will haveto tax the s,ame people who are supposed to profitfrom the preservation of the low fare.

The other alternative is to raise the fare fromthe present level of ten cents to fifteen cents. Itwill certainly be done. And it will certainly proveinsufficient. After a while a rise to twenty centswill follow----with the same unfavorable result.There is no remedy against the inefficiency of pub­lic management. There is a limit to the height atwhich raised rates increase revenue. Beyond thispoint further rises are self-defeating. This is thedilemma facing every public enterprise.

Subways at a Dead End

How little the management of the New YorkCity subways is touched by the spirit of businesswas proved a short time ago when it triumphantlyannounced economies made by cutting down serv­ices. While all private enterprises in the countrycompete with one another in improving and ex­panding services, the municipality of N'ew York isproud of cutting them down!

When economists clearly demonstrated the rea­sons why socialism cannot work, the statists andinterventionists arrogantly proclaimed their con­tempt for mere theory. "Let the facts speak forthemselves; not books, only experience counts."Now the facts have spoken.

It is just a historical accident that transporta­tion systems were nationalized while bakerie'S andautomobile factories remained in the hands of pri­vate capital. If it had ,been the other way round,the socialists would perorate: "It is obvious thatbakeries and automobile plants cannot pay like

railroads. They are public utilities supplying themasses with vital necessities. They must showdeficits, and the taxes paid by the extremely profit­able railroads must provide the government withthe funds required for making good these deficits."

It is paradoxical indeed that Washington is eagerto spend the taxpayers' money for the benefit ofEuropean deficit railroads and does not bothera'bout the transit deficits of large American cities.Marshall aid seems to differ from charity at leastin this-that it does not begin at home.

History has been rather kind to the Americanvoter. It has provided him with object lessons insocialism. If he looks behind the Iron Curtain, hecan learn useful things about the one-party systemof the classless and profitless "peoples' democ­racie'S." If he studies European budgets, he will beinformed about the blessings of nationalization. Ifhe stays at home, he can extend his views by care­fully reading what the newspapers report aboutthe financial breakdown of the world's largest andrichest urban agglomeration, the intellectual capi­tal of Western civilization, the home of the UnitedNations. There is plenty of experience that can in­duce ,a man to analyze scrupulously what the prog­ressive propaganda has taught him, and to thinktwice before again casting his vote for the apostlesof socialization and advocates of public spending.

II W_O_'R_T_H_H_E_A_R_I_N_G_A_G_'A_I_N__IIAcademic Freedomand the Senate Committee

I think one of the reasons why there is such aflurry in some circles about the operation of thiscommittee is that there is so little understandingof the nature of the job done. Senator Jenner madea statement on February 24, a statement on thepurpose of this committee. I had really to go to"York to get the text of that, 'because the news­papers didn't carry very much of that. It was notflamboyant. It did not have anything to do withwitnesses. It was a statement of purpose.

I have watched your hearings, and I have readthis statement of purpose. I find them completelyin accord with one another, and I think if therewere some varied reiteration of this statement ofpur,pose 'so that it would be understood that yourcommittee there said ,that you are not interested inanything that is negative to academic freedom­that,as a matter of fa:ct, you are interested in pro­tecting academic freedom; you are not interestedin taking away the responsibility for the local po­licing of the institutions throughout the 'country­in fact, you are interested only in putting on thebooks here testimony, 'and I am using my language

now, restating it, testimony about conspiratorialconduct, and you are then 'leaving it to the local in­stitution-which the Senator eve'll described as thefirst line of defense--Jboth in its faculty and in itsboard, to judge, to evaluate that testimony and toact on it. You went out of your 'way to say that youhave no interest in doing anything about the con­tent or the method of teaching in the local institu­tions. You are not interfering with that. You areconcerned with this conspiratorial evidence andputting it on 'the books, and leaving it to the localauthorities to judge.

I know from my experience with our witnessesthat you have m!ade it a practiee in every case tosift this evidence in private hearings before itcomes to the public. You even warned me about thenaming of people that might not have had thatbene,fit before this public session started. I knowfrom my own experience, too, that you have alwaysallowed everyone who wanted it to have a lawyerin the private session as weB as in the public one,if he wanted to have it.

I think if all of that were clearly understoodthroughout the country, the overwhelming majorityof people interested in the 'S'Chools and collegeswould say there is absolutely no objection to thatwhatsoever. It is only ibe'cause it is misunderstood.

You have this lunatic fringe on the left, to usethe Roosevelt term, and you have another one onthe right. 'They are both thoroughly propagandized,and they don't see what is going on in the middle.This is 'Something going down the main line rightin the :middle. It is just a matter of putting evi­dence of unprofessional conduct on the books forevaluation by the local authorities.

DR. HARRY D. GIDEONSE, President of Brook­lyn College, in testimony before the UnitedStates Senate Subcommittee to Inves,tiga!tethe Administration of the Internal Secur­ity Act, March 11, 1953

The T'wo Basic Freedoms

In the Atlantic Charter freedom of worship andfreedom of speech were equated with freedom fromwant and freedom from fear. These freedoms arein entirely different categories. Freedom of wor­ship 'and freedom of speech are natural rightsspringing from the nature of man. Freedom fromwant and freedom from fear pertain to the a'Cci­dental conditions of our economic order and psycho­logieal milieu.

Our frontier fathers never looked for freedomfrom want and freedom from fear. They enduredwant and they overcame fear for the more basicfreedoms to use their God-given talents to subduehostile forces and establish peaceful living condi­tions.

THE VERY REVEREND EDWARD B. BUNN, s. J.,

President of Georgetown University, Wash­ington, D. C., in an address at Loygla Col­lege, February 17, 1953

MAY 4, 1953 557

Peronism at Bay

By EUDOCIO RAVINEST'rapped by the results of his economic policy theArgentine dic,tator seeks 'a way out bly territorialexpansion and by p~aying the game of the KremUn.

Since the dictatorship of General Juan DomingoPeron reached the height of its power, BuenosAires has become the focal point of an involvedSouth Am'ertieian intrigue. The Argentine dictator'svis'it to Chile in Fetbruary of this year ushered inthe a'ctive, undisguised stage of this intrigue. Itshowed that the virulent dem,agogy, the cunning,bitter, and exasperating national'ism, the enraged'anti-Y'ankee propaganda---whilch have been and arethe blood and breath of the Peronist policy-havestretched out far beyond the frontiers of Argentina.

Peronism, like the totalitarian despotisms ofHitler and StaHn, is nurtured by dreams of hege­mony; the justicialismo (extreme justice) regimefeels its wings are broader than its nest and as­pires to extend itse'lf as though it were 'a productfor export, like meat, fait, cereals, or leather. Per'on­ism is proselytizing; its fundamental doctrine ishatred of everything originating in Washington.It i's no longer s'atisfied to stay within its own bor~

ders, but is seeking allies abroad, playing up oldenmities, fosltering misunderstandings, ill win, anddis'content, swaying people by arousing feelings ofhate. By SUich methods Peronis'm has revelaled howclosely it is anied" as a politic'al concept to SovietCommunism. The demagogic propaganda and thehidden claws of Peronist expansionism have beenat work in South AmeTica for over six ye'ars. Therehas been no election,rebe:J1ion, or coup d'etat dur­ing that tfme without the intervention of Peronis·m.Peron'ism has m'ade complex and e~tensive effortsto exert pressure on Uruguay, to scheme in Peruand ChHe, to cover Para'gu:ay and Bolivia withblood, and to intrigue in Ri:o de Janeiro and Quito.And now, as the most daring of all these attempts,we have had the visi,t of the Argentine dict,ator toChne.

'The Peronist dictatorship has always been osten­tatiously ,extra'vagantand sp'lendid. Public treasuryfunds ha've finan~ed Syndica!list congresses, internalrteV'olts, ,and cultural contests, as well as coupsd'e'ta,t and prop'aganda in neighboring countries.Peron ha's invited to the Argentine thousands ofSyndical'ist he'ad's, South Ameriean politicians, pro­fessors, journiali'sts, ,writers, and arti,sts, payingtheir transportation and supplying them with com­fortable aecommod'a:tions in the cities of the Plata.All this was a'im'ed at gainiing support for his pol­icy of expansi'on. Such deterrnined work, expensive'and prolonged, has borne fruit in the spe~tacular

558 THE FREEMAN

reception given by the President of Chile, CarlosIhanez, to the diet'altor of the Argentine.

Owing to the mianner in which i1t has operated,Peron'ism has been accused of being fascist ratherthan Communist. Objectively, it practices the meth­ods com'mon to both these forms of totaHtari:anism;it is akin to them in its contempt for freedom andhuman rights, its lack of seruples, its sh:amefulabasement and degradation of parli'ament, and itsinexor'able aggressiveness.

Native Origin a Dunger

To estimate, however, the full magniltude of the'menace which has developed in the Argentine, it isnecessary to re'memiber that Peronism ori'ginated~

developed, and imposed itself not as open fas'cismor Gom'munism, but as a sort of simple and indige­nous Latin American military dictatorship. An ob­scure and resentful military m'an rose up, un­she'a'thed his s!word, climbed to power, made him­self generral by de'cree. By decree also, he wastransformed into the man of destiny, the provi­dential genius chosen by his grateful country torescue it from mortal danger. So, from the shadowsof anonymity, Colonel Juan Domingo Peronemerged, de'claring (at Nazi suggestion) that Ar­gentina was in mortal danger from Washington.

If Peronism has been born as overt fascism, asunmasked Communism, the Western mind wouldhave called, without a doubt, for organized and de­termined resistance. The real danger of Pe'ronismlies in its peculiarly lJatin American origin. ThePeronist dicta!torship has consequently been lookedupon me'rely as the somewhat strident manifesta­tion of 'a harsh nationalism, of an exacerb'ated re­sistance to anything that might be interpreted asforeign interference. For this re'ason the corrosiveaction of Peronism developed in La'tin A'merica notonly with impunity, but with passive complicity.The history of democra'cy in Latin America is arecord of di'ctators who have enslaved it; in theshadow of this dark history there is gr!ave dangertha,t Peronis'm will spread s'tea'lthily across thehemisphere.

And, in spite of its native origin, there is unmis­takable evidence that Peronists and Communistsare today taking part in a common strategy.

Commun'is'm, as expounded by M'arxand Engelsand applied in Russia by Lenin, has suffered severe

practical reverses. The theory of the inevitableclash between the proletariat and the bourge1oisieis bankrupt. Communism has failed to eapture theproletariat of the West. On the contr'ary, this pro­Ietaria;t has shown itself more and more re1ady tountte with the bourgeoisie in halting Communistaggression. Communism as a doctrine has failedboth theoretically and practically, if the volumeand political potential of the Communist parties onthis side of the Iron Curtain are considered.

Nationalism 'E,xploited

Communism, however, achieved spectacular suc­cess when it foHowed the route mapped out by So­viet StaUni-sm. Con1trary to those who championedthe el'ass struggle as the driving force, Stalin gavefirst imp'ortan'ce to the nationaHs,t prejudices ofthe people. For this he developed a vast maneuver,in four stages. As a first step he constantly playedup Russian nation'aHsm, the :love of. the mothercountry, the fanatical devotion for Great 'Russia;at the s'ame time, he inexorably ~rushed any be­ginnings of nationalism in the sateUite countries.l\feanwhHe, Communists worked systematieally toweaken and underm'ine all national sentiment inthe lea;ding countries of the West; at the sametime, they were doing ,their utmost to incite andsaturate with ha'te the nationalism of the economi­cany underdevelope,d c'ountries, which, because oftheir wretched poverty, were r~ady to vent theiranger against those naltions thatenjoy a highstandard of living.

Such have been, so far, the tactics used in themostconspieuous Communist suC'cesses. In China,for eXlample, Communism took hold when the fo~­

lowers of Mao Tse-tung were able to mobilize theChinese people agains't their J'apanese invaders.The most resounding successes achieved by Com­munism in France, Yugosl'avia, and Italy were inthe wartim'e resistance movements in those c'Oun­tries; the Communists exploited the fight againstforeign o'C'cupation and the struggle for liberation.These are the ta'cti'cs by me1ans of wh'ich Commu­nism now incites and inflames·· the peoples of Indo­China, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, M'alaya, and M'orocco,with the object of we'akening the West and under­mining its defenses. Likewise, Soviet Russia isconducting such a campaign in Latin Americ1a.

Through a str'ange and suspicious coincidence,the Peroni'S't Argentine dictatorship has persist­ent'1y undeTt'aken an idenfical campaign.

Obviously, some of the h'ate and HI will of theHitler movement found shelter in Argentina.Nazism influenced the growth of the rahid anti­Yanke,e dema'gogy that was such a useful tool inthe hands of the Perons.

It was pern1aps am1bition and lust for power, thecom,puls'ion to court the masses in order to cementpersonal di1ctiaitorsh'ip, th1at made Peron the loud­speiaker for that dem1agogy of which he is today

the irredeemable captive. In the midst of this stri­dent nationaHs!m Peron's voice is undoubtedly tobe distinguished. But the pr,acti'cal device used isthe same which Moscow in the past entrusted, withmeager success, to the anti-imperialistic leagues ofLatin Americia. Peron's anti-Amerieanism is m'adefrom cloth woven on the looms of Moscow and withthe same thread.

The so-called "third position" of Peronism is afrankly negative attitude toward the defense of theWest. It is an artifice to divide the Americanblockade, m1aking of it a we'aker target for Sov'ietaggression. Yet this ",third position," which claimsto be neutralist, has never voiced the slightest cri­ticis'm against the Soviet postition; instead it hasmade its primary and daily task the accumulationof diatribes l'aden with h1ate and acrimony againstthe country wh1ich is the leader of We.s'tern defense.

It is thus that Peronism .and Communism are inpractice converging more and more each day, inspite of their recently sta'ted opposition. By theirdeeds a true brotherhood has been eemented; andthrough this brotherhood they have est'ablished asystem of co-operation Which seems to function onintim1ate terms, though not in the open. It was notby mere chance that the liberal and democrati~

newspaper La Prensa, the gre'ates't medium of thepress in the Latin wor1ld, w,as persecuted, gagged,closed, and fin1ally expropri'ated, while, at the sametime,- Communist organs in the Argentine were re­eeiving punctu\ally and generously· from the dicta­torship all the newspriint they needed. And in theCommun1ist newspapers-Ja most suspicious coinci­dence-statements weTe being repe'ated simHar tothose made by the Per:onist press; identical epi­thets, simHar attaeks, always direeted against theUnited St1ates and its policy of Western defense.

Birds of a Feather

Further evidence is provided by the presence ofprominent Communists in the Secretariat of thePink House and in the' priva'te offices of the lateEva Peron. These Communists 'were lIed by VittorioCodovHa-high Argentine Communist leader, guideand strategis,t of the Spanish Civil W1ar, agent ofthe Soviet's secret poHce-and headed by IsaacLevinson, Hector P. Agosti, and others.

One clan also find evidence of Communist col·lahoraition in the style, language, tone, and accentof the inflamed manife'Stoes and harangues of thePeronists, which are unparalleled in the long andcorrupt history of Latin American dem1agogy. The

.brotherhood of Peronism and Communism is notonly established and operating in Argentina; thatco-operation is now taking shape as a generalSouth American movement. 'The recent trip ofPeron to ChHe constitutes but one of the steps inthe development of that undertaking.

On February 6 of this yelar, for the first time inSoviet anna:ls, a La'tin Am'eriean diplomat pene-

MAY 4, 1953 559

trated the three-and-a-half-yard thick walls of theKremlin to be greeted personally with militaryhonors by the late Soviet despot. In a conferencewhich lasted forty-five minutes, the Soviet dictatorand the amhassador of the Peronist dictatorship,Leopoldo Bravo, offered the world testimony of po­litical solidarity. By opening the Kremlin's door toAmbass'ador Bravo, Stalin let it be known that hewas willing to make better and further use of theArgentine dictatorship-not the Argent,ine people·--'as a battering-raw which would clear the roadsand open a beach-head in the New World to facili­tate the Soviet ass'ault.

Tool of the Kremlin?

The Soviet gesture is even more signifiC'ant ifone remembers that Peron, Peronism, and its des­camisados (the shirtless) were once the objects ofi'mpassioned attacks by Molotov, at the time whenhe opposed the admission of Argentina to theUnited N:ations. It is suggestive, ironic, and hnpu­dent that those enraged attacks have today beentransformed into flattery. It is as if the ceremonyof August, 1939, when Hitler and Stalin becameallies, were being repeated on a somewhat smallerscale. It seems as though a new Mos'cow-BuenosAires axis is under way and the "third position"is revealing its role as a satellite of the Soviet. Inthe guise of ineandescent nationalism, authenticSoviet policy is being hypocritically i'mplementedthrough the inter-Ameriean activities of the Ar­gentine government.

And now Americans have been notified explicitlythat this Moscow-Buenos Aires axis is try'ing toextend itself to Chile. This is a menace of unpre­dictable magnitude. Peron's visit to Chile tookplace ata time when the economic situation in theArgentine had revealed the, failure of justicialismo,the misery of its conception, and the ineptitude ofits structure. Extensive plans to manufactureatomic energy .from homemade formulae on theisland of He-umul h'ad failed; the dictatorship wasbeginning to feel the slow deterioration broughtabout by the use and abuse of power; a prosperousand hardworking country was being underminedby the prodigal spending, the h!andouts to themasses, the corruption and waste. AU of whichhas crystallized and expressed itself in a cruel andhard phenomenon: inflat'ion.

Inflation, the price which the Argentine is pay­ing for Peronist demagogy, is gnawing away thefoundations of the national ecnnomy. Some sevenyears ago, the dollar was worth three-and-'a-half tofour Argentine pesos. Today, after a long and com­plicated pro'cess of juggling with the exchange, thedollar -is officially quoted at fifteen pesos. But noone can buy a single dollar at that price. Only onthe black market is it possible to buy dollars, atthe rate of twenty-three to twenty-four Argentinepesos for each dollar. Likewise, gasoline, automo-

560 THE FREEMAN

biles, spare parts, machinery, and household ap­plIances of all kinds can be obt'ained only on theblack market. A Chevrolet, which according to theofficial price list should cost 45,000 pesos, can beobtained only at a cost of 120,000 pesos-approxi­m'ately $5,000. The same is true of thousands ofmanufactured articles. In the meanti,me the Peron­ist Five Year Plan, like the Soviet, continues toabsorb enormous sums from the national treasury,while industrializ'ation, so necessary to the life ofthe country and even more so for raising thestandard of living among the Argentines, is notbeing accomplished. The Peronist dictatorship istrapped by the impla'cahle results of its economicpolicy, strangled by the accumulation of its" errors.

Peron is seeking a way out by arming and byterritorial expansion, wi,th the object of establish­ing an Argentine hegemony in a part, at least, ofSouth A'meric1a. In attempting to accomplish theseaims, the Argentine dictator has started down thepath whieh leads to disaster; it will make of him,perhaps to his eventual grief, nothing but a toolfor the sinister work of the Kremlin.

On Borrowed Wings''''hat almost amounted to an international incidentrecently occurred between this country 'and ourneighbor Canada. Telegrams flew back and forth;newspapers were up in arms; the Canadian ConsulGeneral in New York 'was summoned to 'action; andpeople on both sides of 'the border declared withheat that they 'wouldn't stand tby and see theircountry's rights abused. Were the Canadians try­ing to grab off a slice of Vermont? Had Americansbeen secretly infiltrating into 'Ontario? No: thecause of all the caffuffle was a goose.

For years, flocks of Canada geese have settled011 Byram Cove in Connecticut before flying northto nest. This year, at the annua'} migration, a gamewarden saw one lone gander unab'le to get off thewater. In a touching gesture of friendship, a coupleof his fellows skittered beside him, trying to gethim airborne. Foiled in their attempts they finallyhonked mournfully away.

Then the furor broke. 'The Canadians claimedhim; after all, he was a' Canada goose. Su'bscrip­tions poured in, and Trans Canada Airlines offereda special plane. But Connecticut wouldn't ,give himup; according to their lights he was an Americangande'r, in spite of his name.

Weare pleased to report that the matter wassettled without recourse to the United N'ationS. ,Inthe end, Connecticut nobly ceded the gander, whowas pictured in a ceremony 'at the Bronx Zoo,nestling in the arms of his consul, Mr. Ray Law­son, before taking off by plane to join his friendsat Kingsville, Ontario.

JOHN VERNON TABERNER

Decline of the Rule of Law 2.

By F. A. HAYEKConcluding his discussion, the author shows howdisrega.rd of the fundamental purpose of the lawproducedi dic,tatorships and the socialist sta,te.

As the establishment of the Rule of Law in Eng­land was the outcome of the slow growth of publicopinion, the result was neither systematic nor con­sistent. The theorizing about it was mainly left toforeigners who, in explaining English institutionsto their compatriots, had to try to make explicitand to give the appearance of order to a set ofseemingly irrational traditions which yet mysteri­ously secured to the Englishman a degree of libertyscarcely known on the Continent.

These efforts to embody into a definite' programfor reform what had been the result of historicalgrowth at the same time could not but show thatthe English development had remained curiouslyincomplete. That English law should never havedrawn such obvious conclusions from the generalprinciple as formally to recognize the principlenulla poena sine lege, or to give to the citizen aneffective remedy against wrongs done him by thestate (as distinguished from its individual agents),or that English constitutional development shouldnot have led to the provision of any built-in safe­guards against the infringement of the Rule ofLaw by ,routine legislation, seemed curious anom­alies to the Continental lawyers who wished toimitate the British model.

The demand for the est,a1blishment of the Ruleof Law in the Continental countries also became tosome extent the conscious aim of a political move­ment, which had never ibeen the case in England.Indeed, for a time in France and for a somewhatlonger period in Germany, this dem,and was thevery heart of the liberal program. In France itreached its height during the July monarchy whenLouis Philippe himself proclaimed it as a basicprinciple of his reign: "Liberty consists only inthe rule of laws." But neither the reign of Na­poleon III nor the Third Republic provided a fa­vorable atmosphere for· the further growth of thistradUion. And although France made some impor­tant contributions in adapting the English prin­ciple to 'a very different governmental structure,it was in Germany that the theoretical develop­ment was carried furthest. In the end it was theGerman conception of the Rechtsstaat which notonly guided the liberal movements on the Conti­nent but became characteristic of the Europeangovernmental systems as they exislted until 1914.

This Continental development is very instructivebecause there the efforts to establish the Rule of

Law met from the very beginning conditions whicharose in England only much later-----the existenceof a highly developed central administrative ap­paratus. This had grown up unfettered by the re'­strictions which the Rule of Law places on the dis­cretionary use of coercion. Since these countrieswere notwilling to dispense with i,ts machinery, itwas clear that the main problem was how to sub­ject the administrative power to judicial control.It is a matter of comparative detail that in factseparate 'administrative courts were created to en­force the elaborate system evolved to restrain theadministrative agencies. The main point is thatthe relations between these agencies and the citi­zen were systematically subjected to legal rulesultimately to be applied by a court of law. TheGerman lawyers indeed, and with justice, regardedthe crealtion of administrative courts as the crown­ing achievement of their efforts toward theRechtsstaat. There could hardly have been a moregrotesque and more harmful misjudgment of theContinental position by an eminent lawyer than A.V. Dicey's well-known contention that the exist­ence of a distinct administrative law w,as in con­flict with the Rule of Law.

Limits to Coercion

The real flaw of the Continental system, whichEnglish observers sensed but did not understand,lay elsewhere. The great misfortune was that thecompletion of the Continental development turnedon a point which to the general public inevitablyappeared merely a minor legal technicality. Toguide all administrative coercion by rigid rules oflaw was a task which could have' been solved onlyafter long experience. If the existing administra­tive agencies were to continue their functions, itwas evidently necessary to allow them for a timecertain limited spheres within which they couldemploy their coercive powers according to theirdiscretion. Wilth respect to this fie'ld the admini­strative courts were therefore given power to de­cide, not whether the action taken by an adminis­trative agency was such as was prescribed by thelaw, but merely whether it had acted within thelimits of its discretion. This provision proved tobe the loophole through which, in Germany andFrance, the modern administrative state couldgrow up and progressively undermine the principleof the Rechtsstaat.

MAY 4, 1953 Ii 61

It cannot be maintained that this was an inevit­able development. If the Rule of Law had beenstrictly observed, this might well have caused whatDavid Hume had called "some inconveniences," andmight even substantially have delayed some desir­able developments. Although the authorities mustundoubtedly be given some discretion for such de­cisions as to destroy an owner's cattle in order tostop the spreading of a contagious disease, to teardown houses to prevent the spreading of tire, or toenforce safety regulations for buildings, this neednot bea discretion exempt from judicial review.The judge may want expe'rt opinion to decidewhether the pa~ticular measures were necessary orreasonable. There ought to be the further safe­guard that the owners affected by such dec'isionare entitled to full compensation for the sacrificethey are' required to make in the interest of thecommunity.

'The important point is that the decision is de­rived from a general rule and not from particularpreferences which the policy of the governmentfollows at thcs' moment. The· machinery of govern­ment, so far as it uses coercion, still serves generaland timeless purposes, not particular ends. Itma!kes no distinction between particular people.The discretion conferred is a limited discretion inthe sense that the agent is to carry out the senseof a general rule. That this rule cannot be madewholly explicit or precise is the' result of humanimperfection. That it is in principle, however, stilla matter of ,applying a general rule is shown bythe fact that an independent and impartial judge,who in no way represents the policy of the govern­ment of the day" will be able to decide whether theaction was or was not in accordance with the law.

No Permanent Achievement

'The suspicion with which Dicey and other Eng­lish and American lawyers viewed the Continentalposition was thus not unjustified, even though theyhad misunderstood the causes of the state of af­fairs which existed there. It was not the existenceof an administrative law and of administrativecourts which was in conflict with the Rule of Law,but the fact that the principle underlying these in­stitutions had not been carried through to its con~

elusion. Even at the time when, in the later partof the last century, the ideal of the Rechtsstaat hadgained its greatest influence, the more deliberateefforts made on the Continent had not really suc­ceeded in putting it into actual practice as fully ashad been the case in England. There' stHI remainedthere, as an American observer (A. B. Lowell)then described it" much of the kind of power which"most Anglo-Saxons feel ... is in its nature arbi­trary land ought not to be extended further than isa'bsolutely necessary." And before the principle ofthe Rechtsstaat was completely re'alized and theremnants of the polie,e state finally driven out, that

562 THE FREEMAN

old form of government began to reassert itselfunder the new name of Welfare State.

At the beginning of our century, the establish­ment of the Rule of Law appeared to most peopleone of the permanent achievements of Westerncivilization. Yet the process by which this traditionhas been slowly undermined and eventually de­stroyed had even then been underway for nearlya generation. And today it is doubtful whetherthere is anywhere in Europe a man who can stillboast that he need mere'ly keep within the law tobe wholly independent, in earning his livelihood,from the discretionary powers of arbitrary au­thority.

Soc:ialist Inroads

The attack on the principles of the Rule of Lawwas part of the general movement away from lib­eralism which began about 1870. It came almostentirely from the intellectual leaders of the social­ist movement. They directed their criticism againstpractically everyone of the principles which to­gether make up the Rule of Law. But initially itwas aimed ma,inly against the ideal of equality be­fore the law. The socialists understood that if thestate was to correct the unequal results which in afree society differen,t gifts and different luck wouldbring to different people, these had to' be treatedunequally. As one of the most eminent ,legal theor­ists of Continental socialism, Anton Menger, ex­plained lin his Civil Law and the PropertylessClasses (1890):

By treating perfectly equally all citizens, withoutregard to their personal qualities and economic po­sitions, and admitting unlimited competition betweenthem, it was brought about that the production ofgoods was increased without limit, but also the poorand weak had only a small share in that increasedoutput. The new economic and social legislation at­tempts therefore to protect the weak against thestrong and to secure for them a moderate share inthe good things of life. We know today that thereis no greater injustice than to treat as equal what isin fact unequal.

A few years later, Anatole France was to givewide circulation to the similar ideas of his Frenchsocialist .friends in the much quoted gibe about"the majestic equality of the la,ws, which forbidsthe ~ichas well as the poor to sleep under bridges,to beg in the streets, to steal bread." Little didthe countless well....meaning persons who have sincerepeated this phrase realize that they were givingcurrency to one of the cleverest attacks on thefundamental principles of Hberal society.

The systematic campaign which during the lastsixty years has been conducted against all the con­stituent parts of the tradition of the Rule of Lawmostly took the form of alleging that the particu­lar principle in question had never really been inforce, that it was impossible or impracticable toachieve it, that it had no de:finite meaning, and, in

the end, that it was not even de'Sirable. It maywell be true, of course, that none of these idealscan ever be completely realized. But, if it is gen­erally held that the law ought to be certain, thatlegislation and jurisdiction ought to be separatefunctions, that the exercise of discretion in theuse of coercive powers should be strictly limitedand always subject to judicial control, etc., theseideals will be achieved to a high de'gree. Once theyare represented as illusions and people cease tostrive for their realization, their practieal influ­ence is bound to vanish rapidly. And this is pre­cisely what has happened.

The attacks against those features of the Ruleof Law were directly determined by the recogni­tion that to obseTve them would prevent an effec­tive control of economic life by the state. The eco­nomic planning 'which was to be the socialist meansto economic justice would be impossible unle'Ss thestate was able to direct people and their possessionsto whatever task the exigencie'S of the momentseemed to require. 'This, of course, is the very op­posite of the Rule of Law.

Concept of Justice Abandoned

At the same time, another and perhaps evenmore' fundamental process helped to speed up thatdevelopment. Jurisprudence abandoned all concernwith those metalegal ,criteria by which the justiceof a given law can alone be deteTmined. For legalpositivism the concrete will of the majority on aparticular issue became the only criterion of jus­tice applicable in a democracy. On this basis it be­came impossible even to argue about-or to per­suade anybody of-the justice or injustice of alaw. To the lawyer who regards himself as a meretechnician intent upon implementing the popularwill, there can be' no problem beyond what is infact the law. To him the question whether a lawconforms to general principles of justice is simplymeaningless. The concept of the Rechtsstaat, whichoriginally had implied certain requirements aboutthe character of the laws, thus came to mean nomore than that everything the government didmust be authorized by a law-even if only in thesense that the law said that the government coulddo as it pleased.

Years before Hitler came to power German legalscholars had pointed out that this complete empty­ing of the concept of the Rechtsstaat had reacheda point where what remained no longer formed anobstacle to the cre,ation of a totalitarian regime.Today it is widely recognized in Germany that thisis exactly where that development led.

But if there is now a healthy reaction underway in German legal thinking, the state of Britishdiscussion on this crucial problem seems to be verymuch where it was in pre-Hitle'r Germany. TheRule of Law is generally represented as eithermeaningless or requiring no more than legality of

all government action. According to Sir Ivor Jen­nings, the Rule of Law in its original sense, "is arule of action for Whigs and may be ignored byothers." In its modern sense, he believes, it "iseither common to an nations or doe'S not exist." InProfessor W. A. Robson's opinion it is possible to"distinguish 'policy' from 'law' only in theory" and"it is a misuse of language to say that an issue is'nonjusticiable' merely because the adjudicatingauthority is free to determine the matter by thelight of an unfettered discretion; and equally in­correct to say that an issue is 'justic!iable' whenthere happens to be a clear rule of law availableto be applied to it." Professor W. Friedmann in­forms us that in Britain "the Rule of Law is what­ever Parliament, as the supreme lawgiver, makesit" and that therefore, "the incompatibility ofplanning with the Rule of Law is 'a myth sustain­able only by prej udice or ignorance." Yet anothe'rmember of the same group even ,went so far as toassert that the Rule of Law would still be in op­eration if the' majority voted a dictator, say Hit­ler, into power: "the majortity might be unwise,and it might be wicked, but the Rule of Law wouldprevail. For in a democracy right is what the ma­jority m'ake it to be."

In one of the most re'cent treatises on Englishjurisprudence it is contended that in the sense inwhich the Rule of Law has been represented in the'present discussion, it "would strictly require thereversal of legislative measures which all demo­cratic legislatures have found essential in the lasthalf century." That may well be. But would thoselegislatures have reg'arded it as essential to passthose measures in this partlicular form if they hadunderstood that it meant the destruction of whatfor centuries, at home and abroad, had been re­garded as the essence of British liberty? Was itreally essential for social improvement that lawafter law should have given ministers powers for"prescribing what under this Act has to be pre­scribed"? About one thing there can be no doubt:this is essential to the progress of socialism.

AgendaNow is the time to foster that green shootPushing its way through newly broken ground,To know what s'trength j,s latent in the rootWhi'ch has so long ibeen cramped and winter-bound.

Now is the time to harrow up the heartChi1'led into stubborn clods thy years of war;After that Ibleak land barren se'ason, startPutting the plow to willing earth once more.

Now is the time to strip the withered stalk,To prune old 'wood that no more sap runs through,Protect the rabbit from the' hovering hawk,Whose lengthening shadow falls upon us, too.

CANDACE T. STEVENSON

MAY 4,1953 $63

Thorez Comes Home

By EUGENE TILLINGERAfter over two years in Moscow the ailing "Maurice"has su~denly been returned to Paris by -the new Kremlin1nasters. Wha,t lies behind this long-,awaited move?

It happened on November 11, 1950-Armistice Dayin the United States. A few days earlier the FrenchCommunist leader Maurice Thorez had beenstricken by a cerebral hemorrhage. Dismissing theliTen(;l1 speclallsts who had been called in to at­tend him, the Kremlin ordered Thorez flown tol\tIoscow to be treated in a "specialized clinic byRussian doctors."

The ailing 'rhorez was accompanied in the spe­cial Soviet ambulance plane that took off from OrlyAirfield that gray November day by. his common­law wife, Jeanette Vermeerscll, and by AugusteLecoeur, one of the top French Communists. Thir­teen days later, Lecoeur, back from Moscow, toldthe comrades: "Maurice will return early nextyear completely recovered, thanks to the indIs­putable superiority of Soviet [medical] science."

For the past two and a half years, practicallyevery other month, the Communists have announcedThorez' "imminent" return. One Red leader afteranother has told the worried party members that"our Maurice" will return "soon." As time passedand Thorez remained in Russia, the French party'slieutenants became' increasingly a'pprehensive.Needled by the propaganda of such anti-Commu­nist outfits as Paix et Liberte, the French Redshad a hard time quieting the troubled comrades.

When Thorez left for Moscow, Paix et Liberteplastered the billboards of France with posterscleverly appealing to French nationalism, protest­ing: "A snub to the doctors of France! Are Frenchdoctors unworthy or unfit to treat a patient?" Andwhen the Reds announced last year that Thorezwould direct the party from Moscow, Paix et Lib­erte was quick to exploit this "news release" withposters: "Scandalous snub to the members of theFrench OP! ... Here is a new snub, this timedirected at the members of the party's Polit­bureau. The Kremlin seems to be of the opinionthat none' of the'm is able to execute its orders.This scandalous decision must be revoked in thename of national independence and liberty, whichhave -always figured so prominently in the programof the political party."

No other Red leader outside Soviet Russia hashad built around him the sort of legend Thorezhas. True enough, it is a legend created by Agit­Prop-the story of a struggling miner, who be­came the' devoted chief of the largest Red partyon this side of the Iron Curtain. The fact that the

564 THE FREEMAN

"fifty-three-year-old miner" worked but a fewweeks in a mine when he was twenty-two is of lessimportance to the comrades than the emphasis onhis being a "professional revolutionary" since theage of twenty-three'.

The Thorez myth is best symbolized by the useof his first name. They call him "our Maurice" or"comrade Maurice" or simply "Maurice." For theparty faithful he is much more than the secretarygeneral; he is their best friend, personal adviser,beloved brother. Slow-witted and nonintellectual,the burly man with the rough voice makes themalways feel that he is "one of us."

Son of the People

The Thorez legend tells of "Maurice" rISIng,step by step from the rank and file in 1919 to be­come the party's secretary general in 1933, a posthe still holds. His autobiogra1phy, Fils du peuple,first published in 1937, is an interesting case' his­tory in itself. To give just one sample. In the 1949edition (page 67) Thorez teHs how in 1925 he"studied with passion BtaiinYs authoritative book,Problems of Leninism." (Boris Souvarine, the emi­nent French biographer of StalIn, has pointed outthat this is an anachronism as at that time Stalin'sbook had then not even been translated intoFrench!) On page 50 of the 1949 edition Thorezwrote: "During my first trip to Moscow, I had therare chance to see and to hear Comrade Stalin.His remarks, simple and profound at the sametime, made a strong impression upon me." Strangeas it may seem, Thorez did not mention this im­portant fact in the first edition of his autobiog­raphy. The truth is that all these passages glorify­ing Stalin were subsequently added. It should sur­prise no one if the next edition of Fils du peupleomits these eulogies.

The veil of secreey surrounding Thorez' deser­tion from the French Army at the outbre;ak ofvVorld War Two has never been clarified. In Sep­tember, 1939, instead of joining his regiment, hedisappeared, later showing up in Moscow. Con­demned to six years' imprisonment by a FrenchMilitary Tribunal, he w'as granted an amnesty in1944. In the 1949 edition of his autobiography, heignores this episode. French Intelligence is said tohave proof that Thorez, after leaving France se­cretly, went to S'witzerland. and from there. with

the permission of Hitler was transported by theNKVD through N1azi Germany. Legally, Thorez'amnesty covers only desertion in France, and hecould stHI be tried by the army for "intelligencewith the' enemy in time of war."

Despite Thorez' relentless devotion to "thecause" for the past thirty years, there are, never­theless, in the Kremlin files certain dark chapters.Tito's recently published memoirs contain interest­ing hints. According to Tito, Thorez, in 1947 be­fore Tito's excommunication by Stalin, had plannedto come to Yugoslavia to bring about a closer rap­prochement between the French and the YugoslavReds. Stalin arranged inste'ad for Thorez to visitMoscow in November, 1947. Again, according toTito, Thorez was slapped down by the Kremlin onthree occasions during that same period for na­tionalist tendencies. Ea'ch time Thorez repented,welcomed the criticism, and agreed that he hadbeen wrong. In addition, certain rather unorthodoxstatements of Thorez were never forgotten, as forinstance: "One thing happened in Russia, anotherwill happen in France; we'll have our French revo­lution in our own French fashion."

Return of the H.ero

Why then, in April, 1953, did the new Kremlinmasters see fit at last to return the French partyle1ader back to his native country? And how is itthat Thorez, who only a few weeks ago was ob­viously so sick that he could not even attend Stalin'sfuneral, suddenly was well enough to undertakethe long and streiluous trip by railway from Mos­cow to Paris?

One fact has been little publicized in this country,namely thiat the decision to send Thorez back wasmade after S,talin's death. A special meetting washeld in the Kremlin subsequent to the funeral, atwhich French leaders Jacques Duclos and LaurentCasanova were present. Duclos strongly urged thatThorez be sent back to France in order to "stimu­late the masses." Despite his shaky position withthe Kremlin since his arrest by the French policelast summer, he won out. Immediately after thismeeting, the party apparatus set to work in France.A secret circular was sent to ceIl and section lead­ers, giving instructions about the new line to fol­low. Le Figaro, the outstanding conservative dailyin Paris, got hold of a copy.

"Comrade, our brother M'aurice Thorez comesback," the circular announced. "In a few days, hewill again take his pl1ace as the 'he'ad of the party.... [the bourgeois preiss] tries to give reasons forthe return of our comrade. . . . We need not pointout these lies. Nevertheless, we have learned thatthese lies, particul;arly those that specify our al­leged diversions regarding the unity of the party,have found a sort of echo not only among the' non­organized masses of the workers, but also amongc€'rtain of our milit'ants.

"This is regrettable and underlines the lack ofvigilance on the part of the comrades responsiblefor the lo'wer echelon. It has been insufficientlystressed that the intense self-criticism to which wesubmit the party is a manifestation of strength ...it has prevented us from falling into a regrettableopportunism. . . . The return of Maurice Thore'z,his presence among us ... must become the imageof the unity of the party. Now the task of each re­sponsible 'member is to proclaim this unity ...[Thorez'] presence ... marks the renewal of theparty. It is up to us to show how worthy weare of this proof of attachment he gives us."

In my opinion, the return of Thorez at this timeis Httle but a last-'minute face-saving device of theKremlin. Despite all the hullabaloo about themiraculous achieve'ments of Soviet medical science,Thorez' condition has not much improved. Thereason for hurriedly sending him back to Franceseems to indicate that the Kremlin does not wanthim to die in Russia. Maurice Thorez' death onSoviet soil would be extremely embarrassing tothe Reds. After all, it would duplicate the strangedeath of another Communist leader, Georgi Dimi­trov, who also died in Soviet Russia after a curein a Soviet clinic. And coming after the death ofStalin and Kle:ment Gottwald, it might cause toomuch eyebrow-lifting eve'll among the most devotedcomrades.

The return of Thorez fits perfectly into the newSoviet peace offensive. Certain Red propagandahas always portrayed Thorez as an exponent of the"moderate" wing of the party, opposed by "toughguys" like Andre Marty, recently purged and ex­pelled from the ranks. There is no· doubt that theKremlin, aIong the new "co-existence line," hopesto save the unity of the French party. "Maurice"could be the ideal man to bring about a revival ofthe ill·';famed Popular Front.

Popular Front Revival?

For some time, certain neutralist and Leftistcircles in France have sought to re-establish thePopular Front formula, a scheme that would beprecisely what the Kremlin needs at this strategicmoment to torpedo NATO and German rearm'a­mente There are indications that the groundworkis being laid, courteous'ly and discreetly, for sucha revival of the Popular Front by certain Frenchpoliticians of the neutralist fringe. The subtlety ofthis approaich was quite overlooked by the Ameri­can press, which failed to notice the strangeeulogy ex-Premier Edouard Herriot, now Presidentof the French Senate, paid to the U.S.S.R.'s latedictator. In a speech in the Chamber of Deputies,Herriot praised Stalin as a "military genius" and,alluding to the French-Soviet "fraternity in arms,"'went so far as to exclaim: "This memory imposesupon us a duty to address today, when he passesaway [our] salute and respect to the man who ...

MAY 4, 1953 Ei 65

has contributed to our liberation and reinforcedthe ties bet'ween both our peoples, [ties] that we'recreated by commonly shed blood."

Thorez' return at this time might also be moti­vated by the' well-known Communist desire to cre­ate martyrs. In a few weeks, the French NationalAssembly must f1ace its long-delayed task of revok­ing the parliamentary immunity of some top Redde'Puties. Consequently, they could be arrested andtried for treason. What the government has inmind is to prove legaHy that the Communist Partyis not a regular French party, but takes ordersfrom Moscow. It could be the first step towardcrushing the whole' party.

Kremlin's Trump C:ard

If the four deputies in question (J'acques Duclos,Etienne Fajon, Fran<.;ois Billoux, and Auguste Le­coeur) are deprived of their immunity, and conse­quently tried, the party would lose its higherechelon leadership. The Kremlin, foreseeing such asituation, might he trying with the return of Thorezto force the government to revoke his immunity,too, and to arres't him. The arrest of a man so illand paralyzed as Thorez would make him a martyr,not only among his Communist comrades but evenmore, among the befuddled liberals. A martyrizedThorez would be a heaven-sent opportunity toFrance's Com'munists. His prestige is today theKremlin's great trump c'ard in its effort to save'the unity of the French party and to check theintra-party struggle that has been going on sincethe failure of the anti-Ridgway demonstrationsof last summer, which culminated in the purge ofold-timer Andre Marty.

In this connection it is interesting to note that,contrary to all the other Red leaders, Marty hasnot yet repented and confessed his "errors." Thereis some talk in well-informed circles that Martymight soon come out with a bombshell of his ownand found a ne,w "independent" party. But theeventuality cannot be e)rcluded that Thorez mightbring about a reconciliation with Marty. After thesens'ational turn of the doctors' affair in Moscow,such a development is not impossible. Whateverthe ultimate result, from the point of view ofFrench,and therefore Western, public opinion, thereturn of Maurice Thorez to Paris is well timedwith the "new Kremlin line" of temporary "peace"and "co-existence."

AmenWhere winds of doctrine blow,Avoid the draught:The best that man can knowIs to have laughed.

WITTER BYNNER

566 THE FREEMAN

III-__T_H_IS_IS_W_H_A_T_T_H_E_Y_S_A_I_D_"""""",II

Look Who Was Talking,!

Ameri'can effic'iency is that indomitable force whichneither knows nor re'cognize's obstacles; Which withits businesslike perseverance brushes as'ide all ob­stacles; which continues at a task once starteduntil it is finished, even if it is a minor task; andwithout which serious cons'tructive work is incon­ceivable.

JOSEPH STALIN, lecture at Sverdlov Uni­versity, April 1924, as quoted in Proble1nsof Leninism, Foreign Languages Publish­ing House, Moscow, 1947

The Perfect Hostess

The perfect hostess win see to i,t that the works ofmale 'and female 'authors be properly separated onher bookshelves. Thelir proximity, unless they hap­pen to be married, should not be tolerated.

Lady Gough's Etiquette, 1863

Into the Sunlight

I believe with deep conviction that the warriorstatesman at the head of Russi'a wiH lead the Rus­sian peoples, all the peoples of Russia ... intothe sunlight of a broader and happier age for aU,and with him in this task win marlc'h the BritishCommonwealth of Nations and the mighty U. S. A.

WINSTON CHURCHILL, Speech before theHouse of Commons, November 1944

Moth-eaten Refrain

The Soviet Union and the People's Republic ofChina and a number of other states have repeatedlysubmitted proposals for the peaceful settlement ofthe Kore1an dispute, and the only reason the warstill continues in Korea is that the United Stateshas prevented the adoption of these peace pro­posals.

JACOB A. MALIK, Chief Soviet Delegate tothe United Nations, June 23, 1951

Higher Level at. Yalta?

I am inclined to think that at theme'eting withl\Iarshal Stalin and the Prime Minister I can putthings on a somewhat higher level than they havebeen.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT in a letter to Har­old Laski, January 16, 1945, reproduced inHarold Laski, by Kingsley Martin

Classic "Dishwater"

The cheek of every American must tingle withshame as he reads the silly, flat, and dishwateryutterances of the man who has to be pointed outto intelligent foreigne'rs as the President of theUnited States.

Chicago Tim,es, on the occasion of theGettysburg Address

Man as a PromiseBy MAX EASTMAN I

~---------- ----1

Richard Wright seems in his momentous newnovel, The Outsider (H'arper & Bros., 405 pp.,$3.95), to be wrestHng more earnestly with prob­lems torturing his own mind in passing from theCommunist conspiracy to the Existentialist racketthan with those confronting his hero in a suffi­ciently perplexing life. That is all right with me­l like thesis novels----!but it does detract somewhatfrom the verisimi'litude of the story. The hero is arather incredible char1a'cter to begin with, a pro­digious highbrow, a man possessing both intellectand intelligence (in itself a h'ard combination, thesedays, to believe in), and yet not possessed of enoughsense to refrain from murdering people just be­cause they get in his way, or because he doesn'tlike what they stand for. From the standpoint ofthe thesis this is correct, for the hero representsindividualism as against Communism. He repre­sBnts individualism going to the same extremes ofcriminal immora1ism that the Marxist party does-setting up the same claim, that is, to be or to re­place God. But from the standpoint of effectivestorytelling it is not so good. It lowers the intensityof the reader's partricipation in what were other­wise a breathlessly exciting, and is anyway a m'ag­nificently contrived and constructed, plot.

Mr. Wright knows how to wind a man up in acombination of matrimonial and extra-ma'trimonial,parental and nonparental and trying-not-to-be­parental love, la,w, and money predicaments, incomparison to which a barbed-wire entanglementis a pleasant invitation to come through and havesome fun. He knows how to get him out of it too,the only w1ay-----but I am not going to expose thatsecret. Suffice it to say that Richard Wright canconcoct a story with the best of his colleagues inthe murder mystery business, and season it with arich, if somewhat confused, comment on many ofthe vital problems of life.

The main problem he wrestles with seems a littleunreal, or at least unnecessary, to me. It must bereal enough for those whom he describes as feel­ing "insulted at being alive, humiliated at theterms of existence." This affliction, else\vhere de­scribed as a feeling that something has beenpromised and the promise not kept, gave his hero,Cross Damon (named by his mother after thecross of Christ), "a sense of loss that made lifeintolerable." It led him into a life that was indeed

intolerable. But it does not seem to me a sanefeeling, or a good starting point for the journeytoward a philosophy of life. "Existence was notperpetrated in malice or benevolence, but simplyis, and the end of our thinking is that here weare and what can we make of it." This remark,with which I concluded a book when I was aboutCross Damon's age, kept coming into my mind asI traveled with him through his fear-and-gloom­ridden career. It would have undercut a lot of hisagonized lucubrations, and might have saved hima few murders, and quite a number of false startsand involved blunderings. It would certainly havespoiled this story!

Also I think it would have immunized CrossDamon, or his creator, against the blandishmentsof the Existentialists, for it contains about allthere is that is valid, and valuable, in their philoso­phizings. When I called Existentialis'm a racket,that was too extreme. I meant only that it is aproduct of the purely literary mrind, 'a mind in­,terested in having ideational experiences and mak­ing art works or commodities out of them, r'atherthan in ascertaining facts and using ideas forguidance among them. A solemn toy that Existen­tiaHsts h1ave unctuous fun with is the question:What is man? It obviously has no answer excepteither in the experience of any one man, whichcannot be generalized, or in the generalizations ofanthropological science. But it can yield some won­derful intellectual playca'Stles, if you pose it in are'alm called "phHosophical anthropology," suspend­ing for the purpose your sense of fact and ofhumor.

Cross Damon asks this question and seems to bespending his short life hunting for the answer.This is what m1akes him an "outsider"-not hisbeing a Negro. Race troubled him very little. Histrouble was that "he knew he was alone and thathis problem was one of the relation of himself tohimself." That I take to be the beginning of themain thread of Existentialist philosophy that runsthrough this book. If the reader is puzzled as tojust how a self can relate to itself, he will find thematter clarified, I am sure, in these more explana­tory lines which I quote from Kirkegaarde, thefather of Existentialism:

Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is theself. But what is the self? The self is a relation

MAY 4, 1953 567

which relates itself to its own self or it is that(which accounts for it) that the relation relates it­self to its own self; the self is not the relation but(consists in the fact) that the relation relates itselfto its own self.

Nothwithstanding that he is bogged down, for thetime being, in this literary swamp, Richard Wrighthas wise and profound things to S'ay about manychallenging problems in this book. He gives you,along with some tense and terrible excitement, anexperience of the nature and behavior of the facto­tums of the central committee of a CommunistParty in feeling out the qualifications of a pro­,Posed new member-and disposing of him whenthey find he knows too much-that is unforgettable.The fifteen-pa'ge speech with which Cross Da,monstans and baffles them when they get him in acorner, and seem on the point of exterminatinghim, is a masterpiece of learned reflection. As aness'ay in the Freeman it would provoke argumentsto fill the magazine for a year. And what an in­genious way to compel a lazy-minded nation to readan essay!

I must add, too-I hope without taking backeverything I've said-that the answer Wright fi­nally arrives at to that questrion, What is man?,,when Cross murmurs it with a faint last summonsof breath on his deathbed, is as great and memor­able an aphorism as modern literature contains:"Man is a promise th!at he must never break."

A Problem in PsychologyHolmes-Laski Letters, edited by Mark De Wolfe

Howe. 2 Vols., 1650 pp. Cambridge: Harv'ardUniversity Press. $12.50

Harold Laski: A Biographical Memoir, by KingsleyMartin. London: Gollancz. 21s.

Harold Laski was a wonder boy. Born in Man­chester, in 1893, lit,tle Harold at a tender age gavesigns of restless and insatiable precocity ~ At four­teen 'he busied h'imself writing a biography ofAbraham Lincoln, embodying all the violent con­trasts of a black-and-white woodcut. This manu­script, Harold later 'Confided, was destroyed by fire.At seventeen he wrote and published an essay oneugenics,which evoked unqualitfied praise from thefounder of that controversifal science, Sir FrancisGalton, then in his late eighties. At eighteen Laskimarried Frida Kerry. Graduated from Oxford, hewas whisked off to MeGill University to tutor andteach political wisdom to students only slightlyyounger than himself. There he was discovered byFelix Frankfurter (or did Laski discover Frank­furter?); and at twenty-three he was imported toteach at the Harvard Law 8chool.

Early in July, 1916, Frankfurter took Harold toBeverly Farms to present his genius to Justice

568 THE FREEMAN

Oliver Wendell Holmes, then seventy-five years old.This meeting, Harold later confided to Holmes, wasone of the three great events of his life-the others,evidently, being his marriage to Frida Kerry andthe birth of their only child, his daughter Di1ana.

Following that meeting, Harold wrote a bread­and--butter letter to Justice Holmes, a letter whichinitiated this voluminous corres,pondence betweenthe sage in his sevent,ies and the highly articulatevest-pocket dialectician in his early twenties. Me­ticulously and painstakingly edited by M1ark DeWolfe Howe, with a foreword by Justice Frank­furter, these letters mount up to something likesixteen hundred closely pa'cked pages, gathered intotwo weighty volumes. The correspondence w'asbrought to a close only by the death at the age' ofninety-four of Justice Holmes, nineteen years later.

Inevitable, therefore, that the second volumeshould be mostly letters from Laski; and indeedthe chief value of this great collection is the docu­mentary evidence i,t presents of the evolution ofthe British left-wing "intellectual." Laski paintshis own portrait in these outpourings, and the oc­togenarian Justice is mostly on the receiving end.But the wary reader should be careful to distin­guish between the Laski of the HrQ!mes letters andthe real Laski, victim of an intense inner conflictand schizophrenia. Even Mr. Howe is compelled topoint out that elements of exagg.eration, distortion,and falsehood are to be found in Laski's letters.

Behind the soft brown owlish eyes, the sallowfa'ce with its trimmed Chaplinesque mustache, thedemure manner, the dazzling erudi,tion, and thepersuag.ive eloquence, lurked a less lovable and moredangerous Laski. "He would have been very wellliked," Mr. Kingsley Martin adm'its in his bio­graphical memoir recently published in London(to be published here by Viking Press on May 15),"could his statements have heen relied upon." Andit is amusing to note how the British reviewers ofMr. Kingsley's book, themselves mostly admirersof H.J.L., avoid namiing him a deliberate and evencongenital liar. H'arold did not so much lie as "em­broider," "invent," "romance," and "adjust" factsto fit his radical and extr'erne theories. An invet­erate name-dropper and a consummate sycophant,he liked to tell stories of the great and the cele­brated, usually with himself in the scene as a vic­torious parti'Cipant. Mr. M'artin, his intimate dis­ciple and friendly biographer, offers this sample:

In the distinguished assembly in the Senior Com­mon Room of the London School of Economics . . .Harold Laski looked about seventeen, with largeround glasses and the learned mien of Giglamps inthe schoolboy stories. He would suddenly break intothe conversation in his penetrating voice. "Gannan,"he would say to the famous economist, "when I wasdining at Haldane's last night Asqui;th got off abeautiful thing about Curzon which would havepleased you."

Stories of this type abound in his letters to J us­tice Holmes; but there is also evidence that the

sage of the Supreme Court was not too easily takenin. "You certainly seem to wiggle in wherever youwant to," Holmes slyly but disconcertingly wrote,tempering this "dig" with an added rem'ark: "I'mglad to believe tha,t the men in power know a goodthing when they see it."

In fairness to Holmes, even those readers waryof the myth that has been cultivated about his namemust admit that he s'aw through the potential ex­tremism of his industrious correspondent. The oldman of eighty-eight expressed an almost propheticinsight: "I think that the wisest men," he wroteLaski, July 10, 1930, "from Confucius and Aris­totle to Lincoln have believed in the via media. ...But I have not had a very high opinion of the in­telleetual powers of such extremists as I haveknown or known about. All of which is painfullynear rudimentary twaddle~but I say it beeauselittle things once in a while make me wonder ifyour sympathies are taking a more extreme turnas time goes on. I always aim uncertain how farFrankfurter goes. But I noti'Ce that you and he area good deal more stirred by Sacco and Vanzetti,who were turned into a text by the Reds, than bya thousand worse things among the blacks." Earlierhe had written of Laski's "socialism": "I read yourarlticle . . . with a touch of regret at the tone thatyou hint from time to time that the existing orderis wicked. The inevitable is not wicked. If you canimprove upon it, all right, but it is not necessaryto damn the stem because you are the flower."

With the death of Holmes in 1935, the Laskiletters end. It is significant that Laski confessedhis revolutionary sympathies to Felix Frankfurterra'ther than to Holme'S: "Clearly socialism cannotbe attained constitutionally and the Bolsheviks areright. I stay with the Left of Labor, and if neces­say I go to the extreme Left." Could it have bee'llthe loss of the gentle restraining influence of Jus­tice Holmes that brought Harold Laski's inner con­flict out into the' open?

Mr. Martin's biography miakes it clear that thefinal fifteen years of Laski's life were a series ofcrises, of intensified frustration, embitterment,and defeat. Y'et this is the little man of whom A.J. P. T'aylor writes: "His was the most importantinfluence in making English Social Democracy andgiving it its present form."

As Kingsley Martin's book unintentionaIly andeven unconsciously makes clear, Harold Laski wasdriven farther and farther left by his Messianicdelusions and his inability to dominate the L'aborParty and its leaders. Attacked in 1944 and 1945by Churchill and the Beaverbrook press, he brokeout into a rash of libel suits against the' LondonDaily Express and the Evening Standard, as wellas several dailies in the provinces. Laski tried tovindicate himself of the charge that he preached"bloody revolution." Three witnesses took the standto testify that Daski~ in a political campaign, hadincited to violenee and instigated sedition. This

ignominious defeat was said to have "broken Har­old Laski's heart." Subsequently, he lashed out atnearly everything and everybody-not only Jean­Paul Sartre and T. S. Eliot, but even his once­beloved America.

When he died in 1950, at the age of fifty-six, hisfuneral was honored by the presence of ClementAttlee and the entire Labor Cabinet, and suhse­quently a memorial meeting was held under theauspices of the entire F'abian hierarchy. The twoheavy volumes of the Holmes-Lasld letters are suf­ficient evidence of the importance attached to hisname by a certain c1aste of American intellectuals.

R. A. PARKER

Young HeroesBack Down the Ridge, by W. L. White. 180 pp.

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. $3.00

When W. L. White wrote his book on Russia in1945, critics got the screaming meemies. How couldhe be so unpatriotic as to speak against our dearani~s? Since then every book of his has met withcool superiority or silence. But what are they'going to do about this one? They can't attack it asunpatriotic; they can't even make a face at it.Some of them will greet it with the enthusi'asm itdeserves; some of the worst will simply pass by onthe other side and cut it dead. That will 'take gall,but of gall our fellow-triavelers have a big stock.

When Mr. White began this book he meant it tobe the story of doctors, nurses, and techniqueswith the wounded. "But," he s,ays, "another figurebegan struggling free of the typewriter keys, ris­ing from the s'wamp of blood-soaked bandages. Heis the average American boy, just under twenty,who was pulled from his m'alted milks and basket­baH scores ... how he faces pain and death." It istold in the words and actions of the boys them­8elves, a tight, underpainted picture that wouldmake the old Spartans take in their sign.

The new techniques are there, too, the swift sal­vaging of the boys who in other wars were shel1­shocked for years, the device to slave helpless menin their cots in case of unexpected attack, the newdrugs, even the new words. N'ot pretty words buttough, like Mash, which stands for that wonderfulinstitution, a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.

And what the boys who have been taken prisonerand eSicaped think of the enemy. The mistreatmentcame from the North Koreans, they said. If therewas a Chines'e officer around they were safe. Thatis encouraging and, we hope, true.

And smiles, if not beIly laughs. A sweet, silver­haired old gentleman bl"'ings the boys fruits andbooks, and then asks if there is anything else theywant. "Sure," says Jrake, who may never have' agirl of his own. "Girls," he whispers in the oldgentleman's e:ar.

MAY 4, 1953 569

It is a tribute ,to Bill Whlte',s newspaper trainingand skill that he has crammed so many incidents,so much action, and so much emotion into the onehundred and eighty pages of this book. He doesn'tconsider it his most import'ant work, but it seemsto this reviewer a "must."

HELEN WOODWARD

Deep-Damasked Wings

The Selected Poems of Claude McKay. 112 pp.New York: Bookman Associates. $2.75

Out of the ashen wastelands of contemporaTyverse, this posthumous volume of Glaude McKayleaps and glows like a sudden b'loom of bougain­villea. Here -at last is poetry-great poetry.

Around us today droop the Aesthetic Puritans.They abhor the wise' words of Robert Frost: "Apoem begins with a lump in the throat, a lovesick­ness or a homes,ickness." They choose to be mum­mies rather tJhan men. They had rather die ofanemia than admit .. that their hearts beat.

But Claude McKay was not like that. He believedin expressing richly what he had experienceddeeply. He knew that poetry is like the sun, givingus a universe sharable and shared; he chose reasonand the inteUigible word. Fortunately for us, for­tunately for poetry, his African blood was hot andstrong. He brought the passion of the South todimNorthern men, thin and cerebral. He gave usinitiation into reality rich as a cleft pomegranate.Of such is the kingdom of poetry!

I have forgot the special, star'tling seasonOf the pimento's flowering and fruiting;What time of year the ground doves brown the fieldsAnd fill the noonday with their curious fluting.I have forgotten much, but still rememberThe poinsettia's red, blood-red, in warm December.

A lump of homesickness in his throat sent hisimagination to seek and see the dear, lost island:thence he fashioned as poignant lyrics of nostalgiaas the world has known. Yet even his grief affirmslife's glory; even his pain fas1hions a paean for theworld. Thus he creates poetry "innumerable ofstains and splendid dyes," that says yes to life byits explicit philosophy and even more by its sheerand overwhelming beauty. He is what poetry mostneeds today: a classical romanticist.

Of these J ama'icanpoems, perhaps the greatestis "My Mother." Here is a simple-subtle elegy of aboy made a man by grief-so strong and wholethat life and death become the twin sides of the'arch, held in place by the keystone of truth. Itmoved me deeply years ago when, a boy royse'lf, Ifirst read it; it moves me as deeply today. It en­dures unrusted by the years, beautiful beyond thecorrosion of time-a masterpiece.

But there is much more here than even these'rich excursions into the lost land of youth and the

570 THE FREEMAN

South. Claude McKay was a burning spirit, whostrode valiantly into the future; a modern whosought out (as many do), and wl}o found victoryover (as few do), the fiery furnace of our years.

Into the furnace let me go alone;Stay you without in terror of the heat.I will go naked in-for thus 'tis sweet­Into the weird depths of the hottest zone.I will not quiver in the frailest bone,You will not note a flicker of defeat;My heart shall tremble not its fate to meet,My mouth give utterance to any moan.The yawning oven spits forth fiery spears;Red aspish tongues sihout wordlessly my name.Desire destroys, consumes my mortal fears,Transforming me into a shape of flame.I will come out, back to your world of tears,A stronger soul within a finer frame.

Also he was a bold spokesman for his race, bid­ding them die-if they must die-"Pressed to the\vall, dying, but fighting back." Yet his unique andgreatest words are not of conflict but compassion:his people's vi'Ctory, he knew, lay not in rebuttalby more savage violence, but in the gift of a morenoble love.

But the Almighty from the darkness drewMy soul and said: Even thou shalt be a lightAwhile to burn on the benighted earth,Thy dusky face I set amid the whiteFor thee to prove thyself of higher worth;Before the world is swallowed up in night,To show thy little lamp: go forth, go forth!

Here are too great riches for the hands of a re­viewer to hold and bring. The cities of men, themight of Moscow and the blaze of Barcelona, thechasmed subway winds of Manhattan, the "duskyhalf-clad girls of tired feet" who drift like shadowsthrough Harlem, even the snows of New Hamp­shire, spe'ak his unwearying delight in the dramaof time.

But I must mention (for they are almost the bestof all) Claude McKay's beautiful love poems. Heknew the whole of love, from thorn to rose-lovethat ,is the knife in the heart, love that is thecrown of the soul. He brings to American poetry,as no other save Emily Dickinson has, the intensityand wholeness of love's being in both flesh andspirit; and if her intensity is greater, his color isricher.

N'o wonder arid coHectivism and despotic revo­lution could not long deceive and snare such a poet!Poetry like his is life's great antidote to the deathcalled Communism, for it is life itself-rich, free,passionate, wide, joyous.

Claude McKay is not, in quantity of work or de­veloped philosophic width, a major poet. But insheer intense quality-in his clear noble spirit andpassionate sensuous heart, in his material deeplyfused and his technique finely infusing-he is m'a­jor as Catullus and Villon are' major. He is one ofthe true lyric poets of the world, inca'rnatJing agrea,t word in living flesh. Long after the politics

of today are shadows flickering over the screen ofhistory, Claude McKay's poetry will sing andshine, forever timely because forever timeless-anAmerican classic. E. MERRILL ROOT

Romulo-Voice of Asia?Romulo: Voice of Freedom, by Cornelia Spencer.

256 pp. New York: John Day Company. $3.00

When American troops landed at Leyte, press dis­patches reported that General MacArthur wadedashore in knee-deep water. "His aide-de-camp,Brigadier-General Carlos P. Romulo," they added,"was right by MacArthur's side."

Walter Winchell queried one of the correspond­ents: "How come Romulo didn't drown?"

Romulo's physical stature-he stands five feetfour in his elevator shoes-has long been a butt forgood-natured banter. Romulo: Voice of Freedom,by Cornelia Spencer, is apparently an attempt toestablish his spiritual stature. By happy coinci­dence, the publication of this book came at a timewhen Romulo, a former president of the UNAssembly, and now Philippine delegate to the UNand Amrbassador to Washington, was being boostedfor the post of Secretary-'Generai of the UnitedNations.

The cover blurb calls General Romulo "Asia'smost articulate spokesman." The hook is describedas a dramatic recounting of "events that joinedEast and West irrevocably." East and West are, toour chagrin, not yet joined---:irrevocably or other­wise. And, after reading Romulo: Voice of Free­dom, one wonders whether that affable gentlemanshould really be described as Asia's spokesman inthe effort to join them.

Miss Spencer picks up Romulo's story when, as aschoolboy in Manila, he wins a gold medal for aspeech entitled: "My Faith in America." As a re­ward his wealthy father sends him to ColumbiaUniversity, whence he returns to become Professorof English at the University of the Philippines. Inbetween, he works as a cub reporter for the ManilaTimes, for a salary of "four streetcar tickets aday" and for the excitement. Success grips theenergetic little man, and he becomes in quick suc­cession assistant editor, editor, and then politician.As Miss Spencer puts it so graphically: "The deskhe occupied seemed to float from one office to an­other, each more imposing than the one before...."

This peculiar fate, to be always holding on to adesk that floats from bigger to better places-or,in simpler terms, to be on the right side of theright people at the right time----seems to abide withRomulo throughout the book. During the Quezon­Osmena dispute, Romulo sides with Quezon, striv­ing for a tougher attitude toward American legis­lators who were drafting the basis of Philippineindependence. Shortly thereafter, when Quezon be-

comes President, Romulo becomes his Secretary.But when Osmena takes over at Quezon's death,Romulo is on good enough terms with the newchief to be made Resident Commissioner in vVasl;J­ington. And all through this period "Rommy" is aprotege and adn1irer of Douglas MacArthur.

It is MacArthur who-right after the Japaneseattack on Pearl Harbor and Mindanao-makesRomulo a major and puts him in charge of the"Voice of Freedom," the United States radio sta­tion broadcasting from the laterals of Corregidor.During this assignment, which lasts through thedismal and heartbreaking days of American defeatin the Far East, Romulo's stature finally does seemto emerge from beneath Miss Spencer's mediocreprose. Up to that point, he was in danger of drown­ing, not in the waters of Leyte, but among theplatitudinous compliments of his biographer. Now,on Corregidor, Romulo emerges a hero---and a sen­sitive hero-as he gets out his newspaper, fightswith Tokyo Rose over the airwaves, and tries tobring hope to the hopeless defenders of Bataan.

The entire episode, however, including Romulo'sescape in a homemade airplane named "The OldDuck," is told more interestingly, and far morebrilliantly, by Romulo himself in his :book, I Sawthe Fall of the Philippines. Subsequent events, suchas Romulo's le'cture tours through the United Statesand his triumphant return to Leyte with MacAr­thur, are also told by this very articulate soldierin My Brother Americans and I See the PhilippinesRise.

Romulo's United Nations career, described in­directly in his novel The United, began at the SanFrancisco Conference, where he voiced the hope'Sfor peaee that were then filling the air. He attendedmost sessions of the United Nations and, ill: 1949,when the Assembly decided it ne'eded an AsianPresident, he was elected with only the five dis­senting vote'S of the Soviet bloc.

But neither during his tenure as UN AssemblyPresident nor during his other assignments doesMiss Spencer quote General Romulo as making anyworld-shaking statements, either on behalf of Asiaor of the irrevocable union of East and West.

Toward the end of the book, to be sure, wholechapters are devoted to quoting General Romulo'spoetry and prose. Long excerpts are reproducedfrom the General's speeches in the UN at a lunch­eon given by International Business Machines,during the intermission of the Philharmonic broad­cast from New York. But these speeches, wliilefilled with the fluent phrases of polite diplomacy,lack any salient idea that might contribute to worldwisdom or world statesmanship. Reading them onlymakes one more painfully aware that the UnitedNations, so far, has not produced a single states­man of historic stature.

As to General Romulo, if he does not emergefrom this book as a valid spokesman for Asia and

MAY 4,1953 571

a joiner of East and West, he does leave one withthe impression of a gentleman of great charm whounites the affability of the East with the energyof the West. SERGE FLIEGERS

Timely ReappraisalThe Return of Germany, by Norbert Muhlen. 320

pp. Chic:ago: Henry Regnery Co. $4.50

In the opening chapter of this. valuable book theauthor points out that "keeping alive the specter"of a resurrected N'azi Germany is "an essentialobjective in the Soviet plan to subdue America andrule the world." Undoubtedly the many books writ­ten from the Morgenthauist, or Nazism-in-reverse,point of view h'ave aided the Kremlin in its granddesign. By representing the German nation or"race" as "Nazis by their very nature," the authorsof such books, Whether they know it or not, havenot only diverted our attention from the clear andpresent danger of Communist aggression. Theyhave also come near to persuading us to continuetre,ating the whole Germ1an people as aetual or po­tential criminals, instead of enlisting them on ourside in the struggle for the world.

Norbert Muhlen, being himself of German-Jewishorigin, as well as a liberal in the origina'l sense ofthe word, cannot easily be smeared as a fascist oranti-Semite as others have who attempted a pic­ture of postwar Germany uncolored by hate. Hisbook is therefore likely to receive the silent treat­ment from the anti-·anH..;Communists who are nowthe most favored reviewers on the publicationswhich make or break books.

So it is to be hoped that readers of the Freemanwill not only buy The Return of Germany but willtalk about it to their friends, thus helping to sur­mount the barriers set up by surviving wartimeprejudice. Just how high those barriers are in the'case of Germany today, as in the case of Chinayesterday, is illustrated by the many examples ofbiased reporting give'll in this book. Every faintsign, or unsubstantiated report, of "neo-Nazism"is headlined in most ne,wspapers, while the muchmore abundant evidence of anti-N'azi, democr,atic,and pro-Western sentiment is played down ,or notreported at all. To give only one of the many in­stances cited by Mr. Muhlen: In last N:ovember'slocal government eleetions in West Germany, oneout of a total of a hundred thousand representa­tives chosen was a former Nazi storm trooper.Yet "this single N'azi s'eemed-to judge from theheadlines and spiace devoted to his victory in theAmerican press-to be the actual winner of theelect,jons, while' the tens of thousands of anti-Naziselected to office on the same day were more or lessignored."

Seeking to discover the real Germany of todayunder "the dust of old oliches," Muhlen's method

572 THE FREEMAN

was to talk to the German people and study, with­out prejudice or preconceived theories, the evidenceavailable concerning their real,~thoughts, senti­ments, and attitudes. He approached them not as anation ap'art, but as human beings responding inmuch the same way othe'f peoples do to pressures,temptations, and experience. His conclusion is thusvery convincing that the majority of the Germanpeople have an along been neither villains norheroes hut simply "passive non-Nazis."

Most Germ'ans, he continues, "learned about thedeath c'amps only after the war when ... nine mil­lion Germans arrived as fugitives from the Eastwhere two million Germans had been killed afterthe war, when atrocity stories we're a dime adozen." Thus the "particular case of the murderedJews merged in their minds with the destructionof millions of other lives in the war and postwarperiod." Moreover, as he also points out, youngGermans asked why their country alone was "sin­g1ed out to be punished for the atrocities of herdictators, When the democracies did not even pro­test against the simHar mass atrocities committedby Russiians, Poles, Czechs, Hungari'ans, Yugoslavs,etc."

A boy of eighteen, who had joined the HitlerYouth when he was ten, told Muhlen that he couldhave no fa-ith in anyone or anything now thateverything he had been taught to believe w'as de­clared to be wrong. If the Western powers hadpracticed what they preached, the ardor of Germanyouth, abused by Hitler, could have become asource of strength for the' free world. Instead wediscredi'ted the ideals and values we profess to be­lieve in by equating the term "democratic" withwillingness to coHaborate' wi,th Communists. Wenot only appointed Communis·ts as editors of news­papers. We even refused licenses to publishers ifthey could not prove that they were friendly toCommunism. And when we finally changed our pol­icy in 1948, we made it all too clear that our grow­ing hostility to Communism was not based on prin­ciple, but was merely our response to Moscow'sthreat to our own se'curity.

For'tunately, our attitude toward the Germanshas improved sufficient1ly to suggest tha,t we m,ayyet rehabHiitalte the democratic concept in Germaneye'S. Moreover, thanks to their intimate knowledgeof Communist re1alities, .the grea,t majority of Ger­mans unquestionably prefer our side. A large andmost interesting part of The Return of Germanyis devoted to a description of conditions in theEast zone, and to an account of the Germ1an re­sistance to Communist terror.

N'orrbert Muhlen ends his book on a note of hope.Germany is, he thinks, still ready to take the road'Americia could open to her. But, "wha't is not pos­sible (aUhough our diplomats seem to think it is)is to bind a free Germany to the West withoutbinding the West and ourselves to a free Germ'any."

FREDA UTLEY

Although it's difficult to believe that anything intelevision is done on purpose, it's probably no ac­cident that three of the industry's most seriousefforts are channeled on the one safely free day inthe week. (A long time ago this used to be calledthe day of rest, remember?) Since the early faIl,it has ,been possible to diial in to the U. S. Navy'shistory of World War Two, "Victory at Sea," onNBC; switch from there, by long and fancy slow­coach, to the Ford Foundation's "Omnibus" onCBS; and a little later on the same network toarrive at Edward R. Murrow's news feature "SeeIt Now." All this on ea'ch, or any, Sunday after­noon.

It may appear slipshod to group three such di­vergent programs under the single term "serious,"although I do not think so. Certainly it's easyenough to designate the Navy's work as seriouslygood, the Ford Foundation's as seriously silly, andlVlr. Murrow's as seriously useful. But in the enor­ITlOUS and dangerous welter which is present-daytelevision, there is one primary critical considera­tion: to try to assess that work whieh by experi­ment, discovery, or plain brain is developing thislatest machine art into competent TV reporting,TV dramatic presentation, TV small entertainment.These three Sunday programs are all, I think, in­trinsically television shows.

Here is what you get when you dial in to "SeeIt Now" on CBIS on Sundays at 6 :30 P.M. Thes'cene is a TV ne1wsroom, small, and with no trap­pings. An announcer's voice identifies the program,and then Edward R. Murrow swivels into viewand des'cribes his selection of the week's events.Immediately, on a small monitor screen, a filmedrecord of the events begins; this then enlarges tothe size of your own screen, and you are involvedin the action. There is no narration, no musie, nosetting; no placards, maps, or cartoons; and bestof all (and I me'an this), no Murrow. The editorreturns in the middle of the program to introducethe commercial, and again to describe the secondhalf. The total time is half an hour.

Now this is an approach to journalism, or week­lyism, which could only be accomplished on tele­vision; no other means would do. The one dangerinherent in the scheme is that naIve or intermit­tent viewers might think they had tuned in tostraight reporting (page Orson Wells and his Mar­tians of some fifteen ye'ars ago). But the veryshortness of the program ought to take care ofthis eontingency, and in every program I haveseen, Mr. Murrow has been scrupulous about in­dicating which features he and his staff have ar­ranged and which have beenmere'ly photographed.

II TELEVISION'---~~

Some Months of Sundays

IITo detail somewhat further the "perfect COln­

mercial" of this TV feature, it's also fair to sayat once that a good deal of luck is involved. Thesponsor is Alcoa (the Aluminum Company ofAmerica) and there isn't any question that alumi­nurn is not toothpaste. Or cereal. I'm uncertainwhether this is the first of the documentary COil1­

mercials, but it's still the best:, short, always varied,and the fascinating shine of the metal as it getspressed, rolled, fired, and sprayed through the dif­ferent manufacturing processes is extremely goodcamera stuff.

There are no commercial problems, of course,vvith "Victory at Sea," the Navy's filmed historyof WorId War Two. Henry Salomon and his staffhave had access not only to our own official camerafiles but also to those of our late allies and to cap­tured enemy ones. They have worked 'all this ma­terial in to weekly chapters of the great ocean cam­paigns in such a way that the program has beenwinning prizes and polls right round the town.There is an original score by Richard Rodgers, anda narrator. While the Rodgers music seems to mesuperlative, the accompanying spoken script doesnot. There is small point, surely, in viewing thefacts of modern warfare to the accO'mpaniment ofsumptuous dHations from the Book of Joshua, orto rolling, rhapsodic, Whitn1anesque periods. Oftenin watching "Victory at Sea"-and I have notmissed a single chapter-it has seen1ed to me thatit is only when we (the spectators) are "at sea"that we get the plain, strategic, intelligent an­nouncement; and, conversely, it is when we are"on land" or "in the air" that "V2 get the fancy,obscuring riprap. But there is no obscuring theexceHence of this sustained documentary.

Finally we arrive at the Ford Foundation's "Om­nibus," and I wish it were going to be a joyride.Frankly, after some eighteen weeks of watchingthis largest, longest, richest, most promoted, mostelaborate, most pretentious TV effort, I find italmost impossible to sift any serious reason forits existence. Evidently the Ford people wanted toestablish an "Omnibus" of the air, a "Something­for-Everyone" vehicle to contain an hour-and-a-haTfof filmed (and live) art, ideas, and data. On thetechnical end, all was to be experiment-no nag­ging time commitments for commercial spots; noblaring, compulsive announcing voices. On theesthetic end, lists of names were published of thosewho would take part in the programs (notablyAlistair Cook's as some species of enlightened MC).And on the "real" end, sponsors were to be invited,although never urged. Well, las everyone now knows,all this took place; five sponsors have bought it;and public and critical reaction has mainly been asmog of indifference. I think perhaps the Founda­tion's 'TV workshop ought to take a couple of Sun­days off-seriously off-to consider how they mightbe useful to themselves, as well as to the rest of us,in the future. KAPPO PHELAN

MAY 4~ 1953 573

The Company did well im the election year. Net income before taxesshowed an increase over the preceding year. Net sales were the highestin Safeway's history. Uninterrupted dividends on all outstandingstock have been paid since the Company's incorporation in 1926.

NET SALES HIGHEST IN HISTORYAgain in 1952, total aggregate net sales of Safeway Stores, Incorporated and its sub­sidiaries set a new record, totaling $1,639,095,212, an increase of $184,452,216,or 12.68% over net sales in 1951.

EARNINGS AND DIVIDENDSAfter deducting preferred stock· dividends of $1,641,948, earnings amounted to$2.01 per share of common stock. This compares with earnings in the previous yearof $2.26 per share of common stock. Dividend requirements on the 4% cumulativepreferred stock and the 4Y2% cumulative convertible preferred were earned 3.51times. Cash dividends were paid on the common stock at the rate of $2.40 per share.

NET PROFITS INCREASED(Before Taxes)

The net profit before income taxes for 1952 was $17,094,348 as compClred with$1 3,318,809 in 1951. After allowing for a refund of excess profits taxes in theamount of $1,157,000 in 1951 and payment of increased income taxes in 1952,the net profit after taxes on income for 1952 was $7,331,943 as compared with$7,615,851 in 1951.

ASSETS AND LIABILITIESTotal net assets of Sofeway and all subsidiaries on December 31, 1952 totaled$132,273,480. Total current assets of the same date were $232,344,580, and totalcurrent liabilities were $142,948,472.

The ratio of current assets to current liabilities on a fully consolidated basis was 1.63to 1 as against 1.39 to 1 in 1951.

15 YEAR COMPARATIVE RECORD OF SAFEWAY STORES,INCORPORATED AND ALL SUBSIDIARIES CONSOLIDATED

Net Assets Book Value Dividends Paid Net EarningsCapital Per Share 'of Per Share of Per Share of Per Share of

Year (I'nd Surplus Preferred Common Common CommonStock Stock* Stock* Stock*

1938 •• ~ ••••••••• $ 48,407,475 $314 $13.84 $ .67 $1.341939 •••••••••••.• 51,075,334 308 14.26 1.50** 2.201940 •••••••••••• 53,286,166 287 14.38 1.17 1.591941 •••••••••••• 60,007,566 270 14.87 1.17 1.641942 •••••••••••• '60,1 54,048 280 15.23 1.00 1.351943 •••••••••••• 61,453,200 288 15.78 1.00 1.561944 •• ,. ••••••••• 62,564,498 299 16.40 1.00 t.631945 •••••••••••• 63,604,685 311 16.97 1.00 1.591946 .••••••••••• 71,901,081 359 20.18 1.00 4.291947•••••••••••• 76,039,946 388 21.96 1.00 2.751948 ..•••••••••• 81,972,829 428 24.44 1.00 3.501949 •••••••••••• 91,236,990 488 28.22 1.25 5.041950 ••••••.••••• 115,215,274 371 29.76 2.40 5.201951 •••••••••••• 113,821,747 377 29.58 2..40 2.261952 •••••••...•• 132,273,480 266 29.03 2.40 2.01*Number of shares adjusted to reflect April 72, 1945 3.for·1 split.

**Paid in part in five percent preferred stock.

SAFEWAY STORES, INCORPORATED _--------,

--------- \r------- cs \l~COR~ORAT£D \AFEWAY STORl; ,

l\5RAR\AN, 5 \ d A Ca\iforn\Q'P. O. Box 660, Ook an I ANNUAl. REPORT

OP'{ Of '(OUR \952Pl.EASE SENO C •••••••••••••••

NMA£ •••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

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C\1'( ••••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••• •

REMEMBER the "Model T" days of the

automobile? You adj usted the spark and

gas, worked your feet over three pedals

and you chugged away.

Conlpare that to the smooth autolnatic

power plant you drove this morning.

Precision parts made the ilnprovement

possible and Thompson is proud to have

been a part of that constructive revolu­

tion. For example, from cumbersome

foot pedal clutch to today's automatic

transmission was a big improvement and

one of the things that helped was a better

light Inetal casting developed and made

by ThOlnpson.

What hrppene{l to thePjjJ)AlSon thflfloor boardr?

Torque f~on"er'er-A product ofThompson's Light NIetals Division, is a com­bination die and permanent mold casting.Its better surface finish improves operat­ing efficiency and the exclusive manufac.turing process substantially cuts costs.

Other Thompson products are replacing

heavier, more costly parts in many types

of industries - in electric Inotors, house­

hold appliances and airplanes.

It has been a big JUInp from the "chug­

away" of the early cars to the "step-and­

go" of today's automatic drive autOlnobilt;s.

You can count on Thompson to continue

to nlake equally important improvements

in other fields. Thompson Products, Inc.~

Cleveland 17.

• They sleep soundly and unafraid. The adult world tothem is a source of strength, offering protection.

But their adult world of thinking, working Americansrealizes today that a secure future for these youngsters isin jeopardy. There are forces working to destroy our free­doms, undermine our security, and change our way of life.

Standing as a bulwark for the future security of theseyoungsters is our free enterprise system. Farmer, business­man, factory employe, professional man work together forthe greater strength of our country.

International Harvester, tracing its origins back over ahundred years, pledges its continued support to the systemthat has made our nation and our people prosper.

vVe at Harvester, both employes and management, pledgeour best efforts in the same direction for the years to comein order to contribute still more to the welfare of all of us... to the end that these youngsters may have the securefuture we so deeply wish for them.

INTERNATIONALHARVESTER Chicago 1,

Illinois

farm Equipment for easier, more profitable farming • truclcs for bettertransport • industrial power for road-building and earth­

moving • refrigeration for better preservation of food

,i