Piligrimage Among the Scribblers; J. Davenport

John Chamberlain AT a recent Berlin conference of the Mont Pelerin Society-that unique collection of libertarian economists and political conservatives-it was my good fortune to·meet up with my friend John Chamberlain. Charac teristically, he had made up his mind to come to the meeting at the last minute and, with Yankee parsi mony, had chosen a roundabout route: Icelandic Airlines to Luxem bourg, then a punishing bus ride to Frankfort, and finally a late Sunday afternoon flight to Berlin on Pan American (since under present in sane regulations German domestic airlines are prohibited from overfly ing the Eastern zone). Yet at the opening reception of the conference that evening, there was John un fazed by jet lag, mixing among acaA former editor of Barron's and Fortune, Mr. Daven port is author of The U.S. Economy and a frequent lecturer on political economy. John A. Davenport Pilgrimage Amongthe Scribblers demics till well after midnight and exercising his art of effortlessly picking up nuggets of information from whomever he meets-nuggets which will later be transmuted into equally effortless loping prose.

This art of absorption of detail combined with unifying intellection is much in evidence in Chamber lain's new autobiography (A Life with the Printed Word, Regnery/Gate way, $12.95). Superficially, it is the story of how Chamberlain made his way up from cub reporter in the New York Times city room in the late Twenties to book reviewer and how thereafter he met the deadlines for Fortune, Life and many another publication. More fundamentally it is the story of how one man moved steadily from Left to Right-right politically and in the moral sense amidst the clashing and false ideo logies of our times. For anyone pon3 4 THE FREEMAN January dering the tragic significance of the Berlin Wall where the simple crosses mark the deaths of those seeking es cape to freedom, this book is neces sary and I was about to say required reading except that the latter word might offend John's sensibilities. For after all, he has emerged as one of our foremost advocates of the vol untary and cooperative society.

Such voluntarism was in full flower when Chamberlain, born in the same year in which the Wright Brothers took off at Kitty Hawk, grew up in New Haven and its environs, where he keeps a farm at Cheshire, Con necticut. In the turbulent Sixties, he recalls lending his barn to an itin erant youth seeking release from in ner city pavements, only to find his acres invaded by aimless hippies and smogged, one may guess, by mists of marijuana. The incident serves as a deeper recall of the very different motivations of John's youth, when sailing in Morris Cove or expedi tions to East Rock were the order of the day, leaving one too tired at night for endless and aimless palaver. At school in New Haven John mixed freely with blacks before race became a fetish, and with immi grants of all nations-Swedes, Irish, Poles, with only the Italians still re sisting the melting pot. Then on to Loomis Academy where more seri ous study was combined with ice skating on the Connecticut as far as Windsor Locks and canoe trips down John Chamberlain's book re views have been a regular fea ture of The Freeman since 1950.

We are doubly grateful to John and to Henry Regnery for now making available John's autobi ography, A Life with the Printed Word. Copies of this remark able account of a man and his times-our times-are avail able at $12.95 from The Foun dation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533. river to Long Island Sound. Finally an extraordinary Wanderjahr where John and a companion first shipped to New Orleans on the steamer Mo mus and then hitchhiked across Texas and proceeded by rail to the orange groves of California in the days when there were no minimum wage laws or powerful unions to prevent motivated boys from work ing in the packing sheds. It was an era when, to borrow from one of Chamberlain's later books, "men were free to walk over the horizon." His recall of his college education (Yale 1925) and of the Twenties generally exhibits the same artistry and follows the same methodology.

Yale was indeed a magic place with its careless freedom, its occasional gin and orange juice parties and above all the marvelous lectures of 1983 PILGRIMAGE AMONG THE SCRIBBLERS 5 Billy Phelps (Tennyson and Brown ing), Bob French (Chaucer) and Chauncey Brewster Tinker (The Age of Johnson) . Yet one thing was lack ing: a grounding in the great works of political economy and the nature of governmenta lacuna for which as John wisely notes, many a grad including himself were to pay dearly in future. years. In casing the Twenties, Chamber lain attacks the myth that they con stituted a crass materialistic era. They were, in fact an intensely cre ative period as evidenced by the flowering of poetry and literature and John pays loving tribute to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Stephen Vincent Benet, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and many another. Yet this was a time when intellectuals paid scant attention to and even de spised-the enterprise system which sent them to college and sustained them in Greenwich Village and Paris. When the roof fell in in '29, political thinking was already mov ing leftward and the literateurs fell easy prey to Marxian ideologies.

From Left to Right Chamberlain himself was vulner able to this Leftward swing. His first book, Farewell to Reform, published in 1932 when his father, a New Ha ven merchant, was in financial trou ble and when the economy was at sixes and sevens, was a radical doc ument, arguing not only that capitalism was non-reformable but that sooner or later the "syndicates" and collecti vists would march to power. Predictably this left him open to so licitations not just from Socialists but from Communist cells even then boring from within American soci ety. Yet bit by bit, John's Yankee shrewdness pulled him back to more solid ground, influenced, too, by dis cerning Trotskyites who had al ready taken the measure of Stalin, and later by reports of such men as William Henry Chamberlin who de tailed the mass murders of the Com munist Utopia. Switching from the Times daily book column to Fortune magazine, he came to see that businessmen had something to be said for them. He was profoundly influenced by and wrote a ringing foreword to F. A.

Hayek's Road to Serfdom. His clinching conversion to the market economy came, he writes, when on postwar assignment to Britain he discovered that while governments were very good at putting on the economic brakes, they never sup plied the gasoline or leaned on the accelerator pedal for economic ad vance. This negative perception turns into positive affirmation in Chamber lain's mature works: The Roots of Capitalism (1959) and The Enter prising Americans originally de signed for a series in Fortune and later published in book form (1963), 6 THE FREEMAN January still the best history of American business on the market. Here Chamberlain, strongly influenced by the American economist Francis Amasa Walker, breaks new ground. The true hero of the economic pro cess is the entrepreneur, large or small, who sets investment in mo tion and without whom Americans might still be stalled on the Great Plains. In stressing this thought, Chamberlain anticipated by a good many years modern supply siders who place primary emphasis on mo tivation. The business of govern ment is not the impossible one of planning the economic future, but rather setting the framework for creative endeavor by maintaining law and order at home and adequate defense abroad.

War and Peace As to that, Chamberlain's reflec tions on foreign policy are far more diffuse and difficult to interpret than his domestic philosophy. As a child of the disillusioned interwar gener ation he tells with refreshing candor how he at first favored a policy of strict neutrality at the time war broke out in Europe, and only bit by bit came to see how much would have been forfeited had Britain gone down in the terrible summer of 1940 with loss of the British fleet and control of the Atlantic. With Pearl Harbor these doubts and hesitations van ished only to be replaced by arguments as to the conduct of the war and the shaping of the peace. In a chapter close to the end of his book Chamberlain, fascinated by strat egy, pries into some of them: Mac Arthur's application of the theory of double envelopment in the Pacific, and more pertinently for anyone pondering the truncation of Europe today, General Al Wedemeyer's the sis that if only the Allies had launched their cross-Channel inva sion in 1943 instead of 1944 they might have swept the Continent while Hitler and Stalin were bogged down along the Volga.

Here Chamberlain following Wedemeyer attributes the delay to Churchill's "love of empire." It seems more reasonable to suppose that in 1943 the West simply lacked the "gear and tackle" to make the Nor mandy landings possible. Moreover the whole thrust of Chamberlain's book suggests that ideas, no less than logistics, influenced the partition of Europe. The confusion of American intellectuals-what Julien Benda called La Trahison des Clercs played a part in Roosevelt's extraor dinary concessions at Teheran and Yalta. Had American public opinion taken the full measure of the Bear that Walks like a Man, Eisenhower even as late as 1944-45 might have been under firm orders to outpace the Russians to Berlin while Patton captured and held Prague. The guardian of public opinion is, 1983 PILGRIMAGE AMONG THE SCRIBBLERS 7 of course, the free press and when it comes to the press, Chamberlain is fully in stride. His severest shafts are aimed at his first home, the New York Times, which while still an es sential journal of record has fallen far from the standards of Adolph Ochs. John laments how Lester Markel finally took over the Times Book Review from the fairer-minded J. Donald Adams, and he faults managing editor Turner Catledge for his harboring Tom Wicker and Her bert Matthews who represented Fi del Castro as simply an agrarian re former out of the Sierra Maestra.

With his second important em ployer, Henry R. Luce, John is more lenient. He himself squirmed under Luce's'sudden shifts in tactics and dictates when he was writing Life editorials and he criticizes Luce se verely for harboring so many woolly headed Liberals in his entourage. But he concedes that Luce was truly a man of stature, and if he sometimes played with Liberals, he also har bored many a conservative-nota bly Whittaker Chambers who domi nated Time's foreign news when the going was toughest, Charles J. V. Murphy who exposed the disaster of the Bay of Pigs against all the blan dishments of President Kennedy, and for that matter John Chamberlain himself. John learned to his cost just how hard it is for an editor or publisher to hold any group of journalists to gether-prima donnas all-when he joined with Henry Hazlitt and Suz anne LaFollette in launching the fortnightly Freeman in the early Fifties. The venture broke up in squabbling among friends though the name and the tradition are still car ried on today by the journal for which this review is written. Nor was John's venture in editorship all lost. For from the ashes of the old Freeman also came Bill Buckley's National Review and it turned out that Buck ley had the resources and the skill to give the U. S. what it most lacked: namely, a fighting weekly of opinion that melded together libertarian economics with the higher conser vative values as enunciated by Rus sell Kirk. That synthesis in turn has not been lost on Ronald Reagan.

With Reagan's election, the auto biography ends; John Chamberlain is not one to cast the future. But in recalling the past his book surely prepares us for the days ahead and in this sense we are all in Chamber lain's debt. Meeting him again close to the Berlin Wall made me wonder how this man of so many books and columns does it. But that is of course his secret and alchemy and I some times doubt whether he himself could explain it. Facility, yes. But like wise integrity, humility and com passion. These are rare virtues and this is a rare and significant book. ® Hans F: Sennholz JUSTICE is a cardinal virtue that renders to another what rightfully belongs to him. It is the ideal of man, the rule of conduct given to man kind. By necessity of nature man has certain rights, or claims in justice, which are moral and lawful to pos sess or obtain. These rights are an tecedent to and independent of the state, rights which the state must not violate. In fact, the state, or civil society, is instituted to preserve these rights to its subjects, to adjudge rights as between individuals-to render justice. The idea of right and justice is the general basis of the le gal and governmental institutions of what is known as Western Civiliza tion.