Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Writing/or Fortune AMERICAN business, in the early Nineteen Thirties, was definitely unger the gun. Mencken and Sin clair Lewis had, for a decade, been undermining it with their satire: the figure of Babbitt stood out among the booboisie, and it was a moot point whether Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish match king, or Samuel In sull of Chicago was the greatest vil lain. The depression completed what the satirists had begun, -and when Franklin D. Roosevelt took off against the economic royalists, no body outside of the Liberty League dared say him nay. The Liberty League was naturally dismissed as an interested party. Like practically everyone of my college generation I joined the anti business procession. The mood was certainly pervasive-even Henry Hazlitt and Elmer Davis supported Norman Thomas, the socialist can didate for President, in 1932, ratio nalizing their action as a Uprotest vote."

60 Who among theorists was pre pared to defend old economic values at the time? Carl Snyder, maybe, and Garet Garrett. But the Austri ans hadn't yet come to our shores; there was, as yet, no Ludwig von Mises seminar in New York. ~~Plan ning" was the by-word in The New Republic and The Nation, and George Soule, Stuart Chase and Rexford Tugwell were, in Tugwell's phrase, busy ~~rolling up their sleeves to make America over." It would be a long time before the ~~freedom philosophy," as a theory, was to have its principled defenders. But a strange -thing happened to some of us. A beetle-browed man named Henry Luce, the son of a Christian missionary to China, had, during the last days of the Coolidge boom, planned a magazine of busi ness that was to be called Fortune. Ironically, its first issue, dated Feb ruary 1930, hit the mails just when the stock market collapse of October 1929 was being felt.

WRITING FOR FORTUNE 61 The Luce Adventure Luce had a philosophy, all right, but his interest in journalism was predominantly an interest in facts. The facts were flippantly exploited in his news magazine, Time. For For tune he wanted something differ ent-a magazine that would, with proper gravity, treat business as an adventurous drama, something wor thy of the efforts of good men. That was all he had in mind at the start the first editorial expression of a point of view in the magazine came in Roosevelt's second term, when Russell Davenport, the managing editor, started a monthly depart ment called Business and Govern ment. I went to work for Fortune in 1936 still filled with the average New York City intellectual's scorn for the businessman. Nobody tried to con vert me to anything: the idea, as Luce said, was that the ((profit sys tem was a fact, not a cause," and we were supposed to set forth the ((fact"

with vividness and accuracy, letting the reader draw his own philosophic conclusions. How it all worked out is animat edly set forth· in a book brought out on the fiftieth anniversary date of the Luce adventure. Nineteen au thors who had worked in the Luce vineyard were asked to contribute their reminiscences for a volume called Writing for Fortune (Fortune Magazine, Time-Life Building, Rockefeller Center, New York, N.Y. 10020, 194 pp., $15.00). They car ried out the assignment each on his own, with a minimum of editing. Amazingly enough there is little repetition. Sometimes the effect of ·writing for Fortune had radically different results-J. Kenneth Gal braith and myself had much the :same exposure to the ((facts" of corporate America, but we might as well have been investigating the in dustriallife of different planets. But Galbraith and Dwight MacDonald are the only two contributors out of nineteen whose exposure to the ((corporation story" failed to miti gate the socialistic biases that were, at the start, almost universally part of the intellectual baggage of the fledgling Fortune writer of the Thir ties, Forties and Fifties.

More Imaginative Writing Luce's feeling, adequately but tressed by the examples he sawall around him in the Twenties, was that business writers lacked the imagination to do justice to their subject. But where to turn for a dif ferent type of writer? The intellec tual Left hated business. Of intel lectuals in general, Luce said (l:Everything about business which does not actually offend them bores them." If intellectuals didn't promise rnuch, maybe poets would do. Or imaginative writers, novelists not 62 THE FREEMAN January interested in ideology or party-line politics. Poets and novelists would be alive to the color and drama of what General Hugh (Old Iron Pants) Johnson called the ~~savage poetry" of business competition. The early Fortune mastheads are revealing. The editors included Charles Wertenbaker, Green Pey ton, Robert Cantwell, Edmund Gil ligan and James Gould Cozzens, all novelists. Jim Agee, another editor, was a well-known poet. John Dav enport, a poet in college, could spout Yeats by the yard. Louis Kronenber ger, an esthete with little interest in politics, would go on from a Fortune career to be a first-rate drama tic critic. Jack Jessup came out of an advertising agency to adapt his in comparable slow ball to corporate stories that blithely ignored the ad vertising space salesman.

Russell Davenport's Influence Arch MacLeish, Pulitzer poet, was the acknowledged Konzertmeister of the early staff. Russell Davenport, the managing editor during most of the eight years I spent as a Fortune writer, had devoted hours to tinker ing with terza rima, his favorite verse form. His only defect as a managing editor was his practice of rewriting big sections of stories. Since his own sty Ie was so distinc tive, the presence of his interjected paragraphs played havoc with the tonal unity of an article. Charles J. V. Murphy, no mean stylist himself, resented the two-toning of his prose. Lest the strange crew that Luce had assembled to dramatize busi ness should fail to respect facts, the female researchers, many of whom had had actual business experience, stood ready to curb the more florid departures from prosaic reality. The system seemed to work. It not only produced good business stories, it also helped cross-fertilize the arti cles on the mixed economy that had become the prevailing mark of the Rooseveltian decade. Russell Dav enport's business-and-government editorials ~~leaked" by any strict lib ertarian's standards when it came to criticizing what was going on in Washington, D.C. But, in their ten tative way, they foretold that a pe riod of questioning the role of the State in economic decisions would not be long in coming.

For myself, the experience of vis iting factories, mines and board rooms left me open to the arguments of a Hayek (The Road to Serfdom), a Mises (Socialism), an Isabel Pat erson (The God of the Machine), a Rose Wilder Lane (The Discovery of Freedom), when the philosophical backlash to the Keynesian and Marxian theories came in the Nine teen Forties. Fortune gave me in sight into the creative experience that I would never have had if I had remained in the tight little world of the Manhattan intellectuals. I.

1981 OTHER lBOOKS 63 EMPIRE OF THE MASSES: THE DECLINE OF TASTE IN AMERICA by Fred DeArmond (Dorrance & Co., 35 Cricket Terrace, Ardmore, PA 19003),1980 146 pages - $6.95 cloth Reviewed by Vera Brubaker Thompson ANY citizen beyond his teens must be aware of negative factors threat ening the usual pleasant pace ofHfe to which most of us have become ac customed. What has gone wrong? Where are all those bright dreams every American child had, and ex pected to see materialized? The tarnished ideals, the despair, the default of those who pilot the ship of state, the plunge in interna tional prestige, economic uncertain ties, all reflect the decline of taste observed by Fred DeArmond in Em pire of the Masses. (1f America as champion of the West should come out a loser," the author warns, «future historians may· assess the cause to have been corruption of the high spirit that made us great, accompanied by the demise of good taste."

The standard of middleclass liv ing is incredibly high, civil rights seem to have made every man a king, and what is called education is practically a universal possession, the author writes, but «The paradox is that at the same time popular taste is the lowest it has ever been and the anti-cultural' forces are re barbarizing our proud civilization." The book is studded with quota tions of eminent observers to sup port the points of the book's thesis. For example, (1\t least one American saw this intellectual bankruptcy coming. When he was at the peak of his critical zeal as editor of the .American Mercury, Henry L. Mencken said that it was (impossi ble to overestimate the low taste of the American public.' " Universal free schooling was once regarded as a panacea. With what result? According to the College En trance Examination Board, test scores of graduating seniors in 1975 showed a drop for the twelfth con secutive year ... ten points lower in verbal skills and eight points lower in mathematical skills than the high school graduates of the preceding year.

Academic degrees are·. common place, but ignorant skepticism and blind credulity shackle· the mass :mind: «There are sizable numbers of :men and women with college de grees who accept only selectively and 'with reservations the. Ten Com :mandments and the Constitution of the United States. They believe there is no limit to how far the federal Igovernment can go in printing :money and distributing it among the proletariat ... They are skepti cal when conventional wisdom points 64 THE FREEMAN to belief, and credulous of the most monstrous fallacies when presented plausibly and perhaps linked to in grown prejudices." The author paraphrases Solzhen itsyn's Harvard Address and en dorses its charge: ((I looked to your society for a model alternative to my own enslaved country. But America doesn't constitute such an ideal. You have an enormously free press, but an enslaved readership. Almost nothing is officially prohib ited but you are dictated to by the fashions and deluded about the ver ities. Your people exhibit deadly signs of decadence. I am saddened by such things as the revolting in vasion of privacy, by publicity, the TV stupor, and the intolerable music.

((You are being softened by inflated luxury and permitted law lessness. No modern weapon, how ever powerful, can help you if you have lost national will power." What has happened to this once great nation? Many an American is searching his soul, looking for just the sort of help this book offers. Some readers may recall earlier articles by Mr. DeArmond. He won a Freedom's Foundation Award for uThe Right to Choose" from the De cember 1961 Freeman. i HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $3.00 Order from: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION, INC. IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 31:J NO.2 • FEBRUARY 1981 Understanding "Austrian" Economics, Henry Hazlitt 67 An introduction to the basic concepts and principles of the so-called Austrian school of economics. Standards of Living Are Falling Hans F. Sennholz 79 How governmentinterventions have handicapped U.S. productivity and progress.