Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'SNOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Continuing Education IF it weren't for what Henry Hazlitt calls the autodidacts we'd be in a bad way. Tom Bethell, writing in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of National Review, lists some academ ically trained fathers of the suppos edly new supplyside economic the ory, but if it hadn't been for two self taught women, Isabel Paterson of The God of the Machine and Rose Wilder Lane of The Discovery of Freedom, some of us would never have been prepared for the Gospel According to Jack Kemp. Henry Hazlitt traces his own en lightenment to encountering a book by Philip Wicksteed, whose mar ginal utility theory as of 1911 coin cided with what Menger and the ~~Austrians" were teaching. Leonard Read went to school, but it was Bill Mullendore of the Southern California Edison Company who first made him conscious that there was a lot of what John T. Flynn called ~~Cham ber of Commerce Fascism" in Gen eral HIron Pants" Johnson's Na tional Recovery Administration. The point is that we learn when we learn, and formal schooling often has little to do with it.

Ronald Gross has developed this insight in a book which is offered as a self-help ~~open sesame" to what he calls the ~1nvisible University." The title of the book is, appropriately, The Lifelong Learner. The book is spotted with examples of what au todidacts have accomplished' merely by making use of odd moments to pursue hobbies. There is Cornelius Hirschberg, for instance, who put in some 20,000 hours reading on subways, trains, 315 316 THE FREEMAN May buses and during lunch time over a period of forty years. I find it hard to think Mr. Hirschberg could have worked his way through the first fifty-nine theorems of the Principia Mathematica on the subway, or that he could carry enough·· dictionaries and critiques at rush hours to master Dante's Inferno in the Italian. But then, the New York subways were not always the shambles they have become since Mayor La Guardia's passing, and I myself remember reading the three volumes of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga on trips to the Bronx and outermost Brooklyn when I was a cub on the New York Times.

The Lifelong Learner by Ron ald Gross. Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N. Y. 10020. 190 pages, $8.95 cloth. Mr. Gross' ~~invisible university" includes libraries, adult education courses, settlement houses, rnu seums, churches, tape cassettes, cor respondence schools, educational TV and learning exchanges as well as subway trains. A man named Wil liam Glasser helped him to work out the implications of his self-help the ory by writing a book called Positive Addiction. When George UShotgun" Shuba, the old Brooklyn Dodger outfielder, said his ~~natural swing" was developed by swinging a weighted bat six hundred times ev ery day of his life, Mr. Gross knew he had something better than mari juana to cultivate both interest and happiness. The ~~positive addict" has his own way of getting a ~~high," and if he learns ••.·something substantial in the process so much the better.

Corroborating Evidence As if to prove everything that Mr. Gross has to say about self-help, Mortimer Smith offers the story of his adolescence, My School the City: A Memoir ofNew York in the Twen ties. I had known Mr. Smith as one of the founders of the Council for Basic Education, and had always as sumed that his reasoned opposition to sloppy ~~look and say" methods of teaching reading derived from his own academic experiences. But now it turns out that Mr. Smith was a school dropout at the age offifteen. How he eluded the truant officer constitutes a minor miracle, but from 1921 on through the rest of the ebul lient decade of the Twenties Mr. Smith was entirely on his own. He had never heard of any uinvisible university." But New York City-in particular Manhattan Island-did for him what Yale and Harvard of ten failed to do for many of Morti mer Smith's contemporaries. In a way Mortimer Smith lucked 1981 CONTINUING EDUCATION 317 into the beginnings of a literary ed ucation. Answering an advertise ment in the New York Times or the New York World (he can't remember which), the fifteen-year-old Smith, still wearing short pants, got a job as an office boy for Bob Davis, who ran a Iiterary agency in between writing for himself. (In later years Davis did a column for the New York Sun called ttBob Davis Recalls.") Part of Smith's first job was delivering manuscripts to publishers. Often his destination was Street and Smith on Seventh Avenue and Fifteenth Street, where Theodore Dreiser had learned to divide over-long scripts into two. Inventing a new beginning for the second half and a new ending for the first, Dreiser often doubled Street and Smith's output.

My School the City: A Memoir of New York in the Twenties by Mortimer Smith. Published by Regnery-Gateway, Inc., Suite 300, 116 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603. 190 pages, $9.95 cloth. Mr. Smith was negatively im pressed with the motto of Dreiser's employer, Mr. Ormand G. Smith (no relation). The motto was ttthe worse the swill the better you can sell it." Mortimer Smith's own critical awareness was developed by his trips to the lively Smart Set offices at 25 West Forty-fifth Street, where H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan upheld the ttpoint of view of the civ ilized minority." The Smart Set, a forerunner of The American Mer cury, presented such writers as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Eugene O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Reading The Smart Set, the young Mortimer Smith could see that Mencken and Nathan had some thing better than Street and Smith's Nick Carter stories. But the real change in the young Mortimer Smith's reading tastes came when someone in the officesofAlfred Knopf game him a copyof Floyd Dell's Moon Calf This book, about the out-of school novitiate of Felix Fay, helped to ttmark the beginning of literary discrimination" for Bob Davis' office boy, making him ttrealize that the true novel is peopled by recogniz able human beings."

Mr. Smith had no ttgeneration gap" at home. His father, a civil engineer with the municipal government, let him make decisions for himself. When he decided to use a lingering stomach complaint as an excuse to quit school entirely after his gradu ation from grammar school, the el der Smiths let him get away with it. The fifteen-year-old Mortimer ·did attend a few evening sessions at a Continuation School, but when they tried to force ten-finger typing on 318 THE FREEMAN May him he rebelled. He was already an accomplished hunt-and-peck artist. Technically he remains a fugitive from school, never brought to trial for violating the education laws of the State of New York. When he took a job with a firm on Union Square that sold expensive linens, velvets and brocades, Morti mer Smith lost his daily contacts with the literati. But he continued to roam Manhattan's streets in his spare time. He learned to spot the best neo-Renaissance buildings of McKim, Mead and White, and is happy to know that the White de signs are still extant in the Villard houses, the General Post Office, and the Century, Harvard, Lambs and Metropolitan clubs.

Mr. Smith remembers with grati tude that Scribner's bookstore on Fifth Avenue never objected to loi tering.He was not a museum goer, but he loved the libraries. He went through War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov on long subway rides. The Op. Ed. page of the New York World, where Franklin P. Adams (The Conning Tower col umn), Heywood Broun, Alexander Woollcott (drama criticism), Deems Taylor (music) and Laurence Stall ings and Harry Hansen (books) held forth, was a continuing education. When it came to ~~things spiritual" Mr. Smith, an eclectic, tried all the churches. He didn't like Ethical Culture, but he found much nourishment (albeit of a secular nature) at the Community Church of the Reverend John Haynes Holmes. Probably because I spent the lat ter half of the Nineteen Twenties re peating Mr. Smith's Manhattan ex periences, I loved his book. It has (the feel of the rock," including the rock on which Manhattan is built, and it certainly backs up everything that Mr. Gross has to say in The Lifelong Learner.

THE BIRTH OF A TRANSFER SOCIETY by Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill Foreword by JamesM. Buchanan (The Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford, California) 114 pages - $6.95 paperback Reviewed by Roger Ream WHEN the framers of the Constitu tion set out to draft a document that would ~~secure the blessings of lib erty to ourselves and our posterity," they realized that government could easily become the chief threat to that liberty. Since two key requirements for liberty are the security of private property and the sanctity of con tracts, specific provisions were in cluded in the Constitution to protect property and contracts from govern ment infringement. Today, these Constitutional provisions are al1981 OTHER BOOKS 319 most meaningless, as government has become the vehicle for massive redistribution of wealth. This book takes the reader on a journey through American history in search of the causes of the birth of the transfer society. The authors examine court decisions which eroded the constitutional barriers to gov ernment violations of economic free dom. The book is an informative, clearly written and documented ac count ofhow we went from a govern ment of laws (which protected prop erty and contracts) to a government of men. The authors undertake a case-by-case review, demonstrating that ~~two centuries of interpretation [by the courts] have eliminated whatever distinction" once existed between the protective function of the state and transfer activity. uCase after case came before the courts challenging the constitutionality of transfer activity. Not surprisingly, some courts were eventually con vinced that this activity was appro priate for government.", Specifically, it was the case of Munn v. Illinois (1877) that opened the door.

The Munn case involved the power of the Illinois state legislature to set grain storage rates for elevators. Legislatures in midwestern states, influenced by the agrarian Granger movement, enacted laws aimed at regulating the rates of railroads and other~(public" utilities. Legal coun sel for the affected enterprises argued that such laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment's due pro cess clause, the commerce and con tract clauses, and property rights. ((The court's March 1,1877, decision on Munn and other Granger Cases surprised those who were sure that such regulation would be found un constitutional." An excerpt from the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Morrison Waite, illustrates the statist nature of this decision: . ((When, therefore, one devotes his property to a use in which the public has an interest,. he in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has thus created" (94 U.S. 126). The au thors claim that ~~[wlith the Munn decision ... the door for transfer ac tivity at the federal level was thrown open as the court legitimized gov ernmental regulation of private property."

In order to understand Munn v. Illinois, the majority decision must be viewed in the context of shifts in public opinion. Munn v. Illinois di verged from past court decisions and provided a precedent for future as saults on economic freedom because it was based on new political, eco nomic, and social theories that were gaining adherents. The authors cite several shifts in thinking which in fluenced the courts. First, society underwent a transi320 THE FREEMAN tion from a predominantly agrarian to an industrial society. This, in turn, caused changes in the distribution of wealth. In the early years of the country, ~~increases in income were seen as a measure of one's social contribution rather than as evi dence of venality. However, the ris ing tide of egalitarianism during the Jacksonian era meant that, in the eyes of some, any gain by one person had to be at the expense of another."

Some individuals, especially farm ers and those whose wealth or posi tion were threatened, viewed gov ernment as an appropriate means to maintain or enhance their economic status. Another shift which occurred was the expansion of the franchise. This ~~. . . increased [the] reliance on ma jority rule [and] was not conducive to a continuation of a society living under a government restricted by constitutional limits. The problem lay in the confusion between expan sion of the franchise to include a wider spectrum of society and the belief that a simple majority had the right to make all decisions .... But allowing majority rule to dictate any changes in the rules of the game de sired by a majority opened the door for the tyranny so feared by [James] Madison." This change, coupled with ~~[a]n explicit faith in the goodness of man and human progress made government seem much more a ve hicle of social reform than a potential agent of oppression." It presaged court decisions which would erode constitutional limitations on gov ernmental power.

Weare currently in the midst of a change in the political and economic thinking of our country's leaders. Attempts are being made to slow the growth of government spending. However, the basic belief that the redistribution of wealth is a proper function of government remains in tact. The support for current efforts to slow the growth of government is not based on a constitutional or eth ical questioning of whether the state should properly be involved in transfer activities. Until these basic objections are raised, the infringe ment of both political and economic freedoms by government will con tinue. This book makes a strong case for ~~the necessity of basic rules to limit wasteful transfer activity and the importance of ideas regarding limits on government. A formal agreement on the fundamental rights of the members of society is essential to an orderly, productive society .... [However, a] people's concept of the appropriate role of the coercive pow ers of government is crucially im portant in determining the path so ciety takes."

This book can make a significant contribution to the shaping of a new ~~people's concept" provided it gets the attention it deserves. i the Freeman VOL. 3'1, NO.6 • JUNE 1981 Not So Democratic: The Caution of the Framers M. E. Bradford 323 Timely reservations about democratic principles and practices. Signs of the Times Fred DeArmond 331 A violent sense of transience-a civilization without recognized val.., ues. Government Intervention Creates Chaos, Not Jobs Donald J. Senese 335 Why CETA and other make-work schemes fail to stimulate the economy. Inflation Is ... In terms a youngster might understand, Beth A. Hoffman 344 Economy in Government, Jeffersonian Style Clarence B. Carson 346 Economizing efforts of earlier Presidents afford helpful lessons today. Controlling Inflation by Controlling Government Dwight R. Lee 357 The need to limit the federal government's ability to create and spend money.