Book Reviews

116 A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK Grede of Milwaukee by John Chamberlain C raig Miner's book, Grede of Milwaukee (Wichita, Kansas: Watermark Press, 253 pages, $22.50),has to open with an expla nation that "Grede" is not pronounced as it is spelled. It is "Grady" to the ear. This is only the beginning of puzzlement when one is dealing with a complex character who spent all his life trying to simplify things about taxation, charity, the right to join or not to join trade unions, and the centraliza tion of power in the state. Bill Grede didn't find himself very hard to understand. He thought he could work with other activists and still keep to his own opinions. He didn't want to appear as an "extremist," and he tried to tone down some of his compatriots in the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). He thought Dean Clarence Manion went too far in proposing to eliminate the Federal income tax. He couldn't accept Bob LeFevre's libertarian refusal to vote. But Manion and LeFevre were activists who could stir things up. So Grede supported them in hopes that "there may be some beneficial back ground effect from this kind of over-simplification of an issue."

Grede was one of the original members of the John Birch Society, whose general aim was to oppose the spread of Communism. There was nothing wrong in that, but Grede and other early "Birchers" were not prepared to ride the storm created by Robert Welch, the Birch founder who, in a·pamphlet called The Politician,suggested that Eisenhower might be a dupe of the Communists. This wasn't quite calling Ike a party member, but the NAM education committee on which Welch and Grede both served found itself split. There were those who wanted Grede to resign from the Birchers. He couldn't do that-after all, Welch was his friend. Privately he disagreed with Welch's manners, even as he considered that Joe McCarthy had gone too far when he failed to match names and numbers. Grede, who could always be counted on to make a good anti-compulsory union speech, was asked in 1960to become president of the J. I. Case Company, which owed $178 million to 92 banks.

He accepted. When a reporter asked him why he took the job, he said, "That's a good question. When you find the answer let me know." When a strike came, Grede, always "personal and person able," focused "on philosophy and [was} unyield ing on principle." The company could not "in hon esty to itself and in duty to Case employees" abandon its historic American principles by allow ing compulsory union membership. "You are the Case Company," he told the employees, "and we don't wage a life and death struggle against our selves." Unions could not provide jobs-only making and selling tractors created jobs. When tax rates in 1955 went to 55 percent at an income level of $16,000,Grede told audiences that the progressive rates (rising to 91 percent on some personal incomes) "serve primarily to harass, block and penalize those whose work and invest ments mean the most for the nation's future-the economic builders and job makers, not necessarily the wealthy."

Grede was in the foundry business, which meant that he had a special interest in pig-iron prices.

During the OPA period in World War II, Grede had his run-ins with John Kenneth Galbraith. He tried to tell Galbraith that OPA was making prices higher-it had gotten to the point where holding down the price of pig iron had made scrap iron more expensive. Instead of recycling scrap the Grede Foundries used all the pig iron they could, which increased the shortage. The pressure was on for an increase in the price of pig iron. Asked what he would do if the price increased, Grede said, "Don't feel sorry for me; because you raise the price of pig iron $5 a ton and I'll get $15 from my customers." This was where intervention got you. When Forbes magazine accused NAM of "bumptious bungling" in its criticism of Charles E. Wilson for his support of price controls, Grede charged Forbes with ignorance of NAM's operations. Forbes got so much adverse mail on the subject that it voluntarily took a "second look."

Says Craig Miner, "The NAM activitywas a log ical extension of what Grede for Christian reasons had been doing in his company all along. So was his YMCA connection .... Like most business men, Grede had in his early career been relatively quiet about his religious convictions. But in 1948 Grede told a YMCA meeting in Wisconsin that 'the teachings of Christ are not a way of life, but life itself. It is the religion that we weave into our workaday world that is important. '" The common thread between the NAM and the YMCA was that they were both interested in the individual-"one as a person making economic choices and the other as a child of God." There was, says Miner, a constancy in Grede's lifelong interest in and criticism of education. He agreed with Leonard Read that the philosophy of freedom could not be taught in a speech or two. Classroom depth was required. But nothing could save the Birch Society from the sundering caused by the Vietnam War.

Grede never had to speak in the abstract. He could kid himself with manifest pleasure. He enjoyed a column written about him on his 80th birthday that said the first 80 years were the hard est. After that you could relax. "If you forget your name or anybody's name . . . or spell words wrong, you need only explain that you are eighty. ... Nobody expects much of you." That was Grede's chosen exit at 80. He lived for 10 more years, however, and died in a mood of 117 self-criticism that was as keen as anything he had been talking about for decades. One of his final lines was, "1 got to keep on fighting." That is just what he did. D (Readers may order Gredeof Milwaukeethrough their local, independent bookstores.) mE GRAND FAILURE:THE BIRTH AND DEATHOF COMMUNISMIN THE TWENTIETHCENTURY by Zbigniew Brzezinski Charles Scribner's Sons, 866 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022 1989 • 278 pages • $19.95cloth Reviewedby PeterJ. Boettke T his is a grand book-not exactly scholarly, but neither merely polemical. Rather, Brzezinski has written an informed essay on the grandest issue of our day: the debacle of the communist system of political economy. And he has written in a way that is accessible to all.

The 20th century has clearly been the age of socialism. Though, as Brzezinski points out, the century began without the slightest hint that com munism would become a dominant political ideol ogy, "Yet, as it turned out, much of the twentieth century came to be dominated not only by ideolog ical passions but, more specifically, by a passion masquerading as scientific reason, namely com munism." Many people forget that the titanic struggle between Stalin and Hitler in World War II "was a fratricidal war between two strands of a common faith. . . . Philosophically,Lenin and Hitler were both advocates of ideologies that called for social engineering on a vast scale, that arrogated to themselves the role of arbiters of truth, and that subordinated society to an ideological morality, one based on class warfare and the other on racial supremacy, and that justified any action that advanced their chosen historical missions." Clari fying the intellectual connection between Lenin (and Stalin) and Hitler is itself worth the price of the book, but Brzezinski provides much more.

He points out the influence of Stalinism on Western intellectuals throughout the middle of this century: "Yet in the West the notion persisted even into the 19508 and 1960s that Stalinism was historically an ambivalent development, with much good offsetting the bad.... More reveal ing of the attraction to the twentieth-century mind 118 THE FREEMAN. MARCH 1990 of Stalin's experiment in socialengineering was the fact that much of Western scholarship was influ enced by the view-propagated, for example, by the widely read and much cited historian Isaac Deutscher-that Stalinism had been a form of his torical necessity, induced by the imperatives of rapid, politically imposed industrialization of a highly primitive society." The publication of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelagoput an end to the myth of a "positive" Stalinism. But, as Brzezinski points out, "the roots of the catastrophic legacy of Stalin go back to Lenin." The problem plaguing the Soviet Union is not a problem within the system, but rather of the system. The Marxist-Leninist system leads to totalitarian politics and an unworkable economy.

The difficultyGorbachev faces is reforming this system. Brzezinski demonstrates the paradox involved in the current reform process. "The con sensus on the need for reform," Brzezinski writes, "thus represented a compromise regarding the present, obscuring an important disagreement regarding much of the past." "That compromise," he continues, "had a double effect. On the one hand, it permitted criticisms of the Stalinist era to surface and be propagated. The Soviet experience and the Soviet model were thereby even further discredited in the world at large. On the other hand, by perpetuating the fundamentally totalitar ian character of the system through the retention not only of the Leninist-type totalitarian party, with its claim of unique insight into the lawsof his tory, but also of the principal institutions of the Stalinist-type behemoth state, with its crushing subordination of society, the scope of potential reforms was severely circumscribed." Thus, Brzezinski concludes, "The Soviet Union thereby paid a double price. It continued to lose its ideo logical appeal, but it did not gain domestically the wide-ranging freedom to recoup through a gen uinely systemic reform."

Consider, for example, the problems with the ethnic nationalities, such as the nationalist pas sions of the Armenians and Azerbaijanis. The problems, whether good or bad, surfaced because of Gorbachev's policies. "It was impossible," Brzezinski points out, "to preach and even mod estly .to practice glasnostand demokratizatsiia without open expression of national grievances. The legacy of the Stalinist past was too bitter, and the recollections of Great Russian abuse too fresh for the intellectuals and students among the non Russians not to exploit the opportunities that glasnostnow provided." Thus, Gorbachev has to do a tightrope act just to stay in power as the tur bulence with the nationalities fuels the conserva tive fires within the politburo. Gorbachev's political maneuvering, however, is not the crucial issue involved, no matter how important. "The real issue for the future," Brzezin ski writes, "is not whether Gorbachev will last or even whether he willsucceed or fail.The real issue is whether Soviet communism is evolving into a significantly more permissive and economically innovative system or whether it is decaying or even fragmenting." But the ability of the system to evolve into a more open society depends crucially upon the institutionalization of a more pluralistic political framework. Such a scenario, though, calls for the breakup of the party monopoly by monop olists themselves.

If the party refuses to let go of the power struc ture in society, then the crucial question becomes "whether. economic reform can succeed if the par ty is unwilling to retract." As Brzezinski states, "Russian history and Soviet reality ... both con spire against restructuring." "In brief," he con cludes, "the fatal dilemma of the communist sys tem in the Soviet Union is that its economic success can only be purchased at the cost of polit ical stability,while its political stability can only be sustained at the cost of economic failure." The implications of this dilemma provide one with a lot to think about! Brzezinski's book, though, is not just about the Soviet Union. He discusses current developments in Poland and Eastern Europe and China as well. The book addresses the "organic rejection" of com munism as a justifying ideology of political power throughout the world. Communism has revealed itself as an utter political and economic failure.

"Communism's general crisisis deeply rooted in its deficient historical record," Brzezinski writes. That historical record reveals the extreme human costs associated with the communist experiment. "No experiment in social reconstruction in all of human history has entailed a higher price in human terms-or has been as wasteful-as humanity's encounter with communism during the twentieth century." "Humanity's catastrophic encounter with communism during the twentieth century," Brzezinski concludes, "has thus provided a painful but critically important lesson: Utopian socialengineering is fundamentally in conflictwith the complexity of the human condition, and social creativity blossoms best when political power is restrained. " This is an important book to read and discuss. It is a powerful book; the appendix tables in them selves provide an ample picture of the extreme failure of the communist economic system. The Grand Failure is a first-rate contribution to the politics and history of our time. D Professor Boettke teaches in the Department of Eco nomics at Oakland University,Rochester, Michigan.

CHOOSING A COLLEGE: A GUIDE FOR PARENTSAND STUDENTS by Thomas Sowell Harper & Row, Keystone Industrial Park, Scranton, PA 18512 1989 • 224 pages • $7.95 paper Reviewed by David Hood T homas Sowell is a highly respected . economist, scholar, and newspaper colum nist known primarily for his work in the issue of race (The Economics and Politics ofRace) and political theory (A Conflict of Visions). A Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, his schol arship is generally regarded as rigorous, thorough, and quite demanding for the reader. This makes it all the more interesting that his most recent book is geared primarily for high school students and their parents. Choosing a College is a highlyreadable and emi nently practical book, the purpose of which is to aid potential freshmen in the hunt for the perfect place to spend their next four years. In contrast to the large, statistic-filled tomes that one usually turns to for guidance, Sowell'scontribution is more a "how-to" book that givesits reader a list of ques tions rather than a list of answers. Its major pur pose is to prepare the reader for the college search, but in doing so Sowell also educates the reader about the current state of higher education. There in lies the chief interest of the book to those read ers not actively in the college hunt.

For example, one topic discussed by the author as he contrasts the different kinds of colleges and universities in the U.S. is the conflict between research and teaching at many institutions. Sowell OTHER BOOKS 119 points out that while many schools are known for their sports programs (Ohio State, UCLA) or their distinguished researchers (Stanford, Har vard) almost none are famous for their teaching prowess. This is a function of the way in which a professor rises in the ranks; a process where teach ing plays almost no role at all, or may even playa negative role. At Harvard, for example, the cash prize for Teacher of the Year offered by the stu dent body is referred to by some junior faculty as "travel money" since the powers-that-be infer that the exceptional teacher has been neglecting his research responsibilities. Sowell has a reason for spotlighting the "research vs. teaching" debate. His point is to tell rising freshmen that they may wish to look at a smaller liberal arts school to get a quality educa tion, instead of focusing all their attention on becoming an undergrad at Berkeley or Michigan.

As he puts it, "World-class universities do not mean world-class teaching." This is due to extremely large class size, frequency of graduate student-taught courses, and more demands upon the time of full professors at those places known chiefly for their research product. Advocates of liberty in education should note that Sowell recommends mostly small, private institutions for undergraduates-underscoring the fact that the tax-supported schools and their mam moth bureaucracies are not likely to provide such a quality education. The evidence for this can be found in the percentage of students in a given col lege that go on to gain Ph.D.'s. Most large univer sities, particularly state-supported ones, are not even in the top 70 in this category. However, lesser known colleges like Davidson and Occidental rank near the top. Another theme in the book is that one should attempt to match the institution to one's ability to do the work. He gives the example of the student with less-than-average qualifications who happens to get into an Ivy League school. That student might consider himself lucky, but will he feel that way when he consistently scores at the bottom of his class?

Sowell uses this point to discuss the issue of minority admissions at the top universities, and how the affirmative action programs tend to harm those they were intended to help. He argues that college admissions officials, in their rush to get a skin color-conscious body count, often let in stu120 THE FREEMAN • MARCH 1990 dents who cannot do the work and who end up fail ing in college when they could have succeeded at less demanding institutions. At Berkeley, for example, the black student population has SAT scores that are above average nationally but are not comparable to those of the student body as a whole. As a result, nearly three-quarters of the black students fail to graduate, since the campus was mismatched with their level of high school preparation. In pointing out this mismatch Sowell is not engaging in racism or bigotry, but simply arguing that SAT scores and other admissions criteria are related to expected college performance. By plac ing minority students at a campus where their SAT scores are much lower than the school aver age, one is hardly doing these students a favor -instead, one is guaranteeing that many of those students will fail. By way of illustration, Sowell notes that in 1987 only 600 black students scored 1200or above on the SAT. Given that many of the top schools in the country have SAT averages at that level or higher, Sowell posits that many of these campuses will be forced to let in blacks with lower scores to fulfilltheir affirmative action goals.

These students may not be able to keep up with their peers who attended higher-quality, better funded secondary schools, and many may fail to graduate. This is hardly the "step-up" that affirma tive action is supposed to provide to disadvantaged students. The alternative for these mismatched students, according to Sowell,is that many of them willhave to enter less demanding fields of study that willnot be of much use to them even if they do graduate. This whole issue of "interdisciplinary studies," and majors that focus not upon a particular discipline but upon a geographic region or political perspec tive, is another topic in this book. Sowell advises caution in majoring in Women's Studies, Afro American Studies, Peace Studies, and the like because such "disciplines" do not give their stu dents a structured way of thinking as do the tradi tional disciplines-physics or sociology,for exam ple. He argues that these subjects could better be covered within the framework of a real discipline, where courses are more likely to be of educational rather than of propagandistic value. Thus, the role of women in society can be understood much bet ter within the context of a sociologyor history class rather than in a women's studies class.

For the most part, however, Sowell'sbook deals with the nuts and bolts of the admissions process. He discusses application procedures, how to con duct campus visits, the right questions to ask, financial aid, and other matters of immediate interest to those searching for a college. All through the book he cautions against reliance on college admissions officials, professional educa tors, and many guidance counselors, who may have agendas that have nothing to do with getting a particular student matched with the right school. This is good advice for students and their parents, for whom the aura and status of particular univer sities may obscure what kind of education they can expect for their money. All in all the book will do much to de-mystify the whole college search pro cess, and should become an invaluable resource for high school students and their parents. D DavidHood is a law studentat the Universityof North Car olina, ChapelHill.