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From New International, Vol.4 No.12, December 1938, pp.373-375.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
FOR WEEKS NOW, the New Deal’s war drive has been marching along in black headlines: “ARMY MOBILIZES INDUSTRY FOR WAR”, “ROOSEVELT WARNS NATION MUST ARM IN WORLD OF FORCE”, “ROOSEVELT ORDERS DEFENSE SURVEY”. Much is said of “defense”, but very little of who and where is The Enemy against whom we must defend ourselves. A recent issue of Time lifts the veil a bit:
“The Army’s present guesses rate future wars in the following order of likelihood: (1) civil uprisings on the US mainland — some sort of trouble in the social order; (2) war in South America in case fascist economic penetration rubs the US past endurance; (3) war in Europe or Asia for any reason; (4) least likely of all, invasion of the US mainland ... Surprising to most US citizens would be the contents of the General Staff ‘White Paper’—a thorough plan for suppressing civil disorder in the US. In it every large city is divided into possible battle zones. Paved highway intersections are marked down for airplane runways ... US Army officers mull over their ‘White Paper’ a great deal of the time and talk about it none of the time.”
Thus the bourgeoisie, as well as the proletariat, can act on Liebknecht’s slogan: “The main enemy is within our own country.”
Even the editors of the Nation would presumably deplore a Class war. But let us assume that the war comes under categories 2, 3, or 4—what then? The hosts of democracy would be led by a former corporation lawyer and National Commander of the American Legion named Louis A. Johnson, the real power in the New Deal’s War Department. He has been “notably successful” in persuading big industrialists to go along with the New Deal’s war plans. His eloquence has been reenforced by the fact that government contracts, in the next war as in the last war, will be on the scandalous ‘cost-plus’ basis, which makes cheating the government almost obligatory. As for the rest of us, Mr. Johnson points out that in the next war, “The civilians will be fighting, too.” Every one will be mobilized, either to fight or to work. The middle classes and the workers will be conscripted to a man for military or labor service.
“The Social Security Board’s list of some 40,000,000 US citizens, identified by age, residence, and occupation,” drily comments Time, “will be very useful for this purpose.”
* * *
Definitions, No. 1: “A radical is one whose inclinations and beliefs are liberal but whose methods are badly thought out and if put into practice would not work.” Franklin D. Roosevelt (NY Times, Oct. 16,1938)
* * *
The Communist party is supporting the LaGuardia administration in New York City under an inspiring banner: BUILD SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTY!
* * *
When a “liberal” employer is losing money, he acts just like any other employer who is losing money. This axiom is being currently demonstrated by J. David Stern, the only 100% New Dealer among the big newspaper publishers. Mr. Stern has made quite a good thing out of liberalism, expanding his operations from the Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post to the Philadelphia Record, which he made into that city’s first liberal paper since Ben Franklin died. In 1933, he bought the old New York Post and grafted fresh liberal glands into it. But of late Mr. Stern has run into difficulties, especially with the Post: he has had to borrow $3,000,000, to cut the Post’s budget by $5,000 a week, and to chisel on wages. He was the first big publisher to sign a contract with the Newspaper Guild. But that was when the New Deal, and Mr. Stern’s investment in liberalism, were in full summer. Now, as autumn draws in, the Stern papers are clashing openly with the Guild. An attempt is being made on the Camden Courier-Post to form a company union. And on the NY Post, Mr. Stern, balked for months by the Guild in his efforts to slash wages, has discovered a most ingenious detour around union contracts. Not long ago, he asked his employees to “lend” him 10% of their paychecks, the loans to be repaid at 2% when the paper makes money again. “You would lend money to your grandmother,” he argued, “why not to your boss?” He also argued that the transaction was a purely personal matter between him and each employee, and so no affair of any trade union. The old-line AF of L mechanical unions on the Post agreed to this interpretation readily enough, but the Newspaper Guild was obstinate. Mr. Stern said he would close down the Post in forty-eight hours. The Guild was still firm. Mr. Stern denies he called up President Roosevelt and asked for help. But he did call up John L. Lewis, who then called up Guild officials in Manhattan and urged them to accept the proposition “the way Stern wants it”. This the Guild did. It is now preparing its forces to put up a better fight in Philadelphia.
It is odd that very little of all this has appeared in the public prints. The Stalinists in control of the Newspaper Guild are said to be reluctant to expose publicly the staunchest journalistic ally of the New Deal. Partly for this reason, partly from sheer journalistic anaemia, the Nation and the New Republic have said nothing about Mr. Stern’s recent activities. The story goes that the Nation a year or so ago accepted an article debunking Stern’s liberalism, but lost its nerve when the manuscript was branded unfair and untrue by ... J. David Stern.
* * *
Sensational rumors are going about that Chiang Kai-shek has joined the Communist party. They may be traced to the headline in the NY Times a few days after the loss of Canton and Hankow: “CHIANG SEES GAINS IN EVERY RETREAT.”
* * *
A Washington news service, circulated confidentially among business men, gives the best summary of the Wages & Hours Law: “Much room for wiggling and quibbling.”
* * *
This Is the Way the World Ends. Obituaries are generally printed on the inside pages of American newspapers, but the November 3 issue of the NY Times devoted most of its front pages to death notices. The deceased was that system of world society which existed between the battle of Waterloo and the Munich conference. There were three major death notices.
A few years ago, T. S. Eliot wrote:
| This is the way the world ends |
* * *
Definitions, No. 2: “Marx and Engels were German highbrows who sat at the feet of Hegel.” Jerome Frank in Save America First.
* * *
Due Process of Law. Section 7-a of the NIRA gave legal sanction to labor’s right to organize. So does the Wagner Act. When the employees of the Weirton Steel Co. tried to form a union, E.T. (“Shoot-a-Few”) Weir defied the NRA labor board, took the case into the courts, and won a victory, after two years of litigation. All the liberals shook their heads and said, Tsk! Tsk! And now the comedy is being played over again, almost line for line. The second Weirton case is now rounding out its second year. In May 1937, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against the Weirton Steel Co. The Board got around to serving a complaint on the company three months later, and hearings began August 16, 1937. By February 28, 1938, the Labor Board had completed its case. The company began its defense on April 5, 1938, and has been at it, off and on, ever since. To date, 473 witnesses have given 31,919 pages of testimony in 180 trial days. The record now contains 3,721 exhibits and 7,435 objections and motions (of which 6,044, almost all of them made by counsel for Weirton, were overruled). Once more the liberals are clucking with indignation and surprise.
* * *
Suggested name for the nouveaux-Marxist Park Avenue radicals, whose forbears were immigrants on the Mayflower: Plymouth Reds.
* * *
The American Russian Institute is a most respectable organization “to promote cultural relations between the peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union”. In the October issue of its American Quarterly on the Soviet Union, Major George Fielding Eliot published an article on the Soviet army which was so frank that, a few weeks later, the editorial board had to print a lengthy and abject apology for the article, practically repudiating it and promising to be good little boys in future. And indeed the Major’s piece was not very tactful: he expressed doubt as to the Red Army’s morale after recent heavy executions of its commanders, and he criticized, from a purely military viewpoint, the subordination of Red Army officers to Kremlin agents, placed at their elbow in the guise of “political commissars”. Worse yet, the article appeared during the Czech crisis, when Russia’s military strength was an especially tender subject. And worst of all, some demon inspired the Major to make a single exception to his criticism, namely, the Special Red Banner Far Eastern Army.
“This force, 400,000 strong,” he wrote, “has been very little if at all affected by the Tukhachevsky affair. ... The political commissar system is here perhaps more honored in the breach than in the observance. Thousands of miles from Moscow, commanded — apparently with a free hand—by the most capable of all Soviet generals ... the Far Eastern Army is easily the most efficient and the most formidable military force at the command of the Soviet government.”
Shortly after Major Eliot’s article appeared, it became evident that the commander of the Far Eastern Army, Marshal Vasili Galen-Blücher, “most capable of all Soviet generals”, had fallen into disgrace and perhaps had even shared the fate of Marshal Tukhachevsky. The political exigencies of the bureaucracy had once more clashed with the needs of the Soviet Union, and with the usual result.
* * *
Some engineers of the Republic Steel Corporation who are laying a pipe-line in Venezuela have sent Tom Girdler, chairman of the company, a perfect gift: Marguerita, a 120-pound jaguar. No mention is made of a cage being included.
* * *
The CP’s of today will be the MP’s of the next war.
* * *
Not long ago, Justice Salvatore A. Cotillo of the New York Supreme Court issued a sweeping injunction against picketing in the Busch jewelry stores strike. When the strikers violated its terms, as they had to do if they were to continue the strike, he handed out heavy jail sentences and fines, and also cited their lawyer for contempt of court. The interesting thing about Judge Cotillo is that he was elected to his present position, which pays some $20,000 a year, with the endorsement of the American Labor Party.
* * *
I was shocked by the “message to the future” which Albert Einstein wrote to be deposited in the New York World’s Fair 5,000-Year “Time Capsule”. (A rather vague message from Thomas Mann was also included, along with such objects as a lipstick, a baseball, and a newsreel of the bombing of Canton.) There was nothing vague about Einstein’s message. He began with a few words on this century’s progress in applied science, and went on to point out that “the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized” and that “people living in different countries kill each other at irregular intervals”. Then, as calmly and soberly as though he were setting down the inescapable final terms of an equation, Einstein concluded: “This is due to the fact that the intelligence and character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who produce something really valuable for the community.” It is hard to accept the fact that a man may be a great scientist and at the same time, in political matters, as much the unconscious dupe of his class prejudices as lesser men. And it is depressing to think that Dr. Einstein is a refugee from that very fascism whose ideology he here expresses.
* * *
Definitions, No. 3: “The advance guard of human thought is everywhere weighed down with useless Marxist baggage.” (Editorial in the September issue of the well-known avant-garde magazine, Common Sense.)
* * *
The forces of Democracy won a close victory in the recent Chilean elections. It was the first Popular Front coalition in South American history, and it carried that peculiar form of political life far beyond anything yet seen in Europe. (The law of combined development may have had something to do with it.) The champion of Democracy, Pedro Aguirre Cerda, was a millionaire landowner and a member of the “Radical” party, which is about as radical in Chile as in France. He made it clear immediately that there will be no farcical Blum Interlude: the velvet glove will be peeled off the iron hand the day the Popular Front government takes office.
“Left-wing governments which have been in power during recent years,” Senor Aguirre told reporters, “could have accomplished much more if they had been assured two assets: discretion on the part of the rulers and discipline among the masses.”
Asked whether his communist supporters might not insist on “extreme policies”, Aguirre replied:
“The communists and socialists have asked for no pledges, for no places in my cabinet. Their demands have been limited to the platform which we adopted.”
He also pointed out that, while the Radicals moved slightly to the left in joining the coalition, “the socialists and the communists made an even greater shift to the right”. The final comedy touch came when the Chilean Nacistas, or Nazis, angry because the present conservative government suppressed their attempted coup last month, joined the Popular Front coalition.
* * *
Who dragged whom how many times around the walls of what? To commemorate Chamberlain’s aerial visits to Hitler, John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, published the following quatrain in the London Times:
| As Priam to Achilles for his son, |
But I can’t help remembering what Achilles did to the body of Priam’s son before handing it back to the father. Mr. Chamberlain, too, received a somewhat damaged piece of goods.
* * *
Alfred A. Knopf announces for early publication a book entitled, The Rise of European Civilization. I suggest Mr. Knopf put this on his printer’s RUSH! list.
* * *
The Spanish Labor Bulletin for October 14 reports that a joint manifesto has been issued by the Socialist and Communist parties, the CNT, UGT and FAI calling for “the unity of the world proletariat” in defense of ... “liberal Spain”.
* * *
Practically every one with a radio heard the glad tidings, sent out from the President’s fireside shortly before the elections, that Prosperity was once more abroad in the land. Very few people, on the other hand, saw a report issued by the Federal Reserve Board at about the same time, which stated:
“The country’s volume of deposits is near the all-time peak, while the turnover of these deposits is at the slowest rate on record.”
In New York City, for example, the volume of checks cashed is normally eighty times the average of deposits. Today, it is only twenty-five times deposits. This means, of course, that capital is piling up in the banks without being able to find outlets for profitable investment. It is true that corporation earnings are reviving, that the automobile companies are rehiring men by the tens of thousands, that the steel industry has pulled itself up to over 60% of capacity operations. But these are superficial indices. It is precisely in the most crucial sector—the stimulation of new capital investments—that the New Deal has broken down most disastrously. Today, as in 1932, investors just aren’t investing—despite the housecleaning and fumigating of the SEC. Banks just aren’t lending — despite the periodical exhortations of Jesse Jones of the RFC to “cease frightening potential borrowers away”. (New Dealers, like their friends of the CP, seem to think of capitalists as wilfully and perversely refusing to make money.) Since bank loans and new—as against refunding—security issues show no signs of coming back to pre-1930 levels, the President’s words of cheer are to be taken no more seriously than his famous smile.
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