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."

The True Causes of Decay In the course of time the U.S. decided that Sumner was right in his excoriation of imperialism. We restored Cuba to its own p.oliti cians, we freed the Philippines, and we permitted the Puerto Ricans their own choice of govern ment under a loose arrangement that ties them to Washington no more onerously than Canadians and Australians are tied to Lon don. Sumner would have been pleased by this development, though he would probably be startled to see what a mess Fidel Castro has made of Cuba. Sumner was not a particularly good prophet when he argued that our militaristic spree of 1898 would turn us into a France, a Germany, or a Spain. If the "old American republic" which Sumner defended has collapsed, it is for many reasons other than our in dulgence in a three-months war that was fought, after all, by a volunteer army and navy. Real militarism in America didn't start until the draft was made compul sory in World War 1. However, in other essays that are reprinted in Murray Polner's volume, Sumner hits accurately at all the true causes of decay. Such essays as "Discipline," "Legislation by Clamor," "The· Absurd Effort to Make the World Over," "War,"

"Economics and Politics," and "Advancing Social and Political Organization in the United States" abound in truly profound prophet ic insights. The Academic World In "Discipline" Sumner takes a poke at his own academic col leagues for failing to see that "the academic world is a little com munity by itself in which the great natural forces which bind older men to sobriety and wisdom act only imperfectly." The man who is "trained in chemistry," Sumner said, "will become a strict analyst ... but he will be likely also to rest content with this destructive work .... The man who is trained on history will be quick to. discern 1965 FORGOTTEN PROPHET 63 continuity of force or law ... but he will be content with broad phases and will not be a strict analyst The man who is trained on rnathema ties, will have great power of grasping purely concep tual relations .... but he will be likely to fastenuponasubordi nate factor in some other type, of problem. . . . The man who is trained on the science of language approaches the continuity ... of history with 'a guiding thread in his hand but the study of language always threatens to degenerate into a cram of gram matical niceties and a fastidious ness about expression, under which the contents are forgotten."

In recent years Sumner's listing of the defects of academic quali ties has become all too obvious. Great scientists and mathemati cians (Linus Pauling, Bertrand Russell, even Einstein) have talked enough nonsense about poli tics to fill thel shelves of the British Museum. Historians who grasped the threat of Fascism have failed to trace' its a,ncestry to Bolshevist variations on Marx ist philosophy. And academicians of all types do not seem to know the difference between a true law, a hypothetical theory, and an. in genious assumption. To use Sum ner's phrase, "they would put a saving clause in the multiplication table." The lack of academic common sense has produced our modern political economy of perpetual in flation, which has been sanctioned by economists who come properly under the heading of men "trained on history" who are "quick to dis cern continuity of force . . . but will not be strict analysts."

The Prophetic View Sumner knew what was coming, all right; he said "the next gen erations are going to see war and social calamities." In the essay on "The Conquest of the United States by Spain" he remarked that "the field for dogmatism in our day is not theology, it is polit ical philosophy." In his essay on "War" he prophesied that the "race difference" in our Southern States "may prove worse and more fatal to the internal integrity of the peace-group than such old an tagonisms of interest as disturb Ireland, the n~tional antagonisms which agitate Austria-Hungary, or the religious antagonisms which distract Belgium .... No one has yet found any way in which two races, far apart in blood and cul ture, can be amalgamated into one society with satisfaction to both." In the essay on "Economics' and Politics," which was optimistic about the economic future but pes simistic about the political clash between doctrinaire democrats 64 THE FREEMAN June and "plutocrats," Sumner let ar row after arrow of prophecy wing to the mark. "The discovery of the radio-active substances," he said, "may prove to be the greatest of all discoveries yet made by man."

(This was uttered in 1905.) At tacking the Interstate Commerce Commission, he-said "we are only at the beginning of ... what has been written on that page headed 'Interstate Commerce.' ... We know there is no commerce which is not, or may not at any moment become, interstate commerce." The New Dealers and the Great Socie tarians have since shown us how practically everything, from the drug store trade to a twenty-mile intrastate commuting run, can be handled under the commerce clause of the Constitution. And as for recent political events, listen to Sumner as of 1905: "The un animity of the vote proves nothing as to the convictions of congress men ... but only as to the excel lence of the party discipline." And then there is the final stinger, again as of 1905: "The victorious party in an election is regarded as having conquered the country." If you want wisdom and a guide to the future that is still ahead of us 55 years after Sumner's death, The Conquest of the United States by Spain and Other Essays is your book of the year. ~ Force or Reason Do YOU NOT SEE, first, that - as a mental abstract - physical force is directly opposed to morality; and, secondly, that it practically drives out of existence the moral forces? How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?

If you tie a man's hands there is nothing moral about his not committing murder. Such an abstaining from murder is a mechanical act; and just the same in kind, though less in de gree, are all the acts which men are compelled to do under penalties imposed upon them by their fellow men. Those who would drive their fellow men into the performance of any good actions do not see that the very elements of morality - the free act following on the free choice - are as much absent in those upon whom they practice their legislation as in a flock of sheep penned in by hurdles. You cannot see too clearly that force and reason - which last is the essence of the moral act - are at the two opposite poles. AUBERON HERBERT (1838-1906) Tom Rose 3 Stanley Yankus 11 James E. Blair 13 John C. Sparks 22 Wendell J. Brown 28 William Henry Chamber/in 37 Clarence B. Carson 45 JULY 1965 Why Automation? The Threat of Competition .