Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK A GENERATION AGO the,re were many who could identify William Graham Sumner's "forgotten man." The "forgotten man" was the sober, hard-working, frugal middle-class citizen who patiently obeyed the law when the politi cians fleeced him via taxes to pay for all manner of "humanitarian" schemes. When Franklin D. Roose velt falsely identified Sumner's "forgotten man" with the reliefer who made no money and paid no taxes, he was quickly corrected in magazines like Mencken's Ameri can Mercury. In recent ye,ars, however, it is Sumner himself who has become the "forgotten man." He has no real present-day successor at his own university of Yale', where the late Albert G. Keller and Maurice Davie once carried on in his name. It is doubtful that one in a thou sand undergraduates today knows much about Sumner beyond the fact that he wrote Folkways, a book about the origins of human customs which has been taken to justify a complete relativism in the fields of ethics and politics.

The Folkw'ays misrepresents JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Sumner, who was a ~tern moralist in economics and social theory and who was perhaps further away from the theory of "anything goes" than any other publicist of the la.te nineteenth century. Because of the misrepresenta tion and neglect of this "forgotten man" who pioneered the study of sociology in the United States, it is good to welcome Murray Pol ner's selection from Sumner's speeches and magazine articles that is published as ·The Conquest of the United States by Spain and Other Essays (Regnery, Gateway paperback, $1.45). This little book is astoundingly alive, and students who encounter Sumner as a writer on social problems for the first time will be amazed to see how di rectly he speaks to our own e'ra. Sumner opposed what he took to be the U.S. adventure in im perialism in 1898, when we drove Spain out of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Since he was aiming his shafts at people who really wanted our country to be come a colonial power in the ex ploitative mold of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Spain it62 THE FREEMAN June self, his essay on the "conquest of the United States by Spain" was relevant to its time and place. His peroration to this essay has a glorious ring. "My p.atriotism," he wrote, "is of the kind which is out raged by the notion that the United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months' campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain. To hold such an opinion as that is to abandon all American standards, to put shame and scorn on all that our ancestors tried to build up here, and to go over to the standards of which Spain is a representative."