A NEW PATTERN for A TIRED WORLD by LOUIS BROMFIELD Arno Press & The New York Times New York • 1972 Reprint Edition 1972 by Arno Press Inc. Copyright © 1954 by Louis Bromfield Reprinted by arrangement with Harper & Row, Publishers. All rights reserved. Reprinted from a copy in The State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library LC# 72-174234 ISBN 0-405-00416-8 The Right Wing Individualist Tradition in America ISBN for complete set: 0-405-00410-9 See last pages of this volume for titles. Manufactured in the United States of America A New Pattern for a Tired World I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I A NEW PATTERN for A TIRED WORLD by LOUIS BROMFIELD HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS New York A NEW PATTERN FOR A TIRED WORLD Copyright, '954, by Louis Bromfield Printed in the United States of America All rights in this book are reserved. No part of the book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written per- mission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical anicles and reviews. For information address Harper & Brothers 49 East 33rd Street, New York 16, N. Y. FIRST EDITION A-D Library of Congress catalog card number: 53-11829 Contents Marked· While Engaged in the Lost Art of Reading Vll Author's Note xxv I Government by Propaganda and Pressure II The Fallure of a Policy 2 I III A Brave New World 76 IV Dynamic Capitalism vs. Capitalism by Inertia 130 v The World Failure and Decline of the Marxian Illusion 180 VI Summary Notes I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I Marked While Engaged in the Lost Art of Reading 1. LIBERALISM Blaming the other fellow is sterile diplomacy; it is much more important to make a new start. TOM DRIBERG, British Labor M. P. in Time Magazine It is also false that, to be liberal, we must see government as the sole agent of advance. Has not the initiative.and genius of one man-George Washington Carver-done at least as much for the "progress and re- form" of the South as the govemment'sballyhooed TVA? Do we dis- believe in "progress and reform" simply because we trust the spon- taneous energies of free men, and distrust Washington? E. MERRILL ROOT, "Are the 'Liberals' Liberal?," Human Events, September 23, 1953 True liberalism is found not in striving to spread bureaucracy, but in striving to set bounds to it. True liberalism seeks all legitimate freedom, in the confident. belief that. without freedom, all other blessings are vain. Liberalism is a force truly of the spirit coming from a realization that economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved. HERBERT HOOVER, from an address at Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, Ohio, April I I, 1953 Is there an open season for treason, as there is for deer .hunting and trout fishing? This question is posed by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Ac- cording to an A.P. dispatch from Seattle, she deplored the "furore" over the White case, as she once deplored the exposure of her friends, Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie. Mrs. Roosevelt is quoted as adding that a change has occurred in the nation's "moral climate," "placing the case of White in a· different· perspective from 1946." The vast majority of Americans, one suspects, would be inclined to paraphrase a saying of Calvin Coolidge in this connection. There is no right to commit treason and espionage, or to abuse governmental· office to advance the·interests of a foreign power, under any circumstances, in any year, at any time. THE FREEMAN, an editorial vii viii MARKED WHILE ENGAGED IN THE LOST ART OF READING The new mood of social science is little different from that of the con- servative critics of the nineteenth century, except that now the intel- lectuals attribute the gloom to their own lostness. The mood is mixed with sad contrition. NEW LEADER It is not entirely fanciful to regard sex as being to the individual what power is t6 the collectivity. We are all familiar with the miseries and abnormalities of those who try to escape from the harsh realities of the flesh into fantasies of idealized love. Similar miseries and abnormalities are liable to result from a like attempt to escape from the harsh realities of power into fantasies of political idealism. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE in Time Magazine The American State is a peculiar organism, unlike anything in modern Europe or in the ancient world. JAMES BRYCE in The American Commonwealth To one who advised him to set up a democracy in Sparta, "Pray," said Lycurgus, "do you first set up a democracy in your own house." LYCURGUS in Plutarch's Apothegms of Kings and Great Commanders 2. WORLD AID There is no such thing as foreign relations in the abstract. GEORGE F. KENNAN This is in some aspects an age of "Tout comprendre c'est tout pardon- ner." Gone are the inflexible laws of political morality applied or, at any rate, expounded by people like Gladstone or Broadbent. Gone is the belief in the intrinsic desirability and applicability of the principles of the British Constitution; gone is the old belief in the universal applicabil- ity of the doctrines of the Rights of Man. Weare historical relativists. We understand that it is absurd to expect Russia to evolve in the direc- tion of Anglo-Saxon representative government; we can see that the People's Democracies are just what the doctor ordered, that the Mao regime in China is perhaps a little rough, a little careless of objective truth, but nevertheless that may be, probably is, the way that true free- dom will come to China. Every society can find its own. way to salva- tion, and it is stupidity or arrogance to expect the political and social evolution of the world to be based on universally accepted principles and practices. Each nation can go to heaven or hell in its own way and, [...]... Korea has fully confirmed the unemotional analysis of American military strategists, made long before the 1950 communist attack, that present-day Korea is a military liability and not an asset to the United States This Asian peninsula,considered so strategically vital half a century ago that Russia, China and Japan fought two wars for its possession, has been rendered strategically insignificant by. .. used to make its annual appearance off the coasts of the United States on the eve of debate in Congress on an armed forces appropriations bill Now we have familiar and almost as addled reports of vast and overwhelming armaments being built up in Soviet Russia It is notable that in all th,e fear propaganda about the advances in bomb construction in Russia, not once has any fact been revealed as to the... defense-air, land and sea -ean each play an equal role They are compelled to rely on new concepts rather than on standing armies which can never match the Red Army Although traditionally a sea power, the British have accepted the fact that Russia cannot be blockaded and have therefore drastically curtailed naval expenditures Their air force has become the "first line of defense" in the ocean of the sky... postwar year that Great Britain, the one-time international banker.of the world, has not experienced a dramatic foreign exchange crisis International conference has followed international conference, and yet the "dollar" problem persists This certainly appears a complicated and intractable problem Yet its fundamental cause and cure are alike simple: the dollar shortage is a result of governmentally... bombing airplane Today the same japanese strategists who once attached so much value to Korea can be indifferent to its fate; airfields in adjacent Siberia and Manchuria offer just as much of a threat to Japan as any Korean airfields could do On the other hand, Russia and China no longer need to be greatly concerned about Korea unless an aggressive anticommunist government emerges there on their land frontiers... late U.S Senator ARTHUR VANDENBERG in a letter dated October 24, 1950 (Quoted by Demaree Bess in the Saturday Evening Post) In Asia, China is the key to the trouble Had America provided early aid to Chiang and a Yangtse TVA, instead of pressing for a Communist coalition, not only would a historical balance have been found to Japan but a historically pro-American power would have been placed on those... only as one of vast wars, disorders and revolutions but also as the Age of Propaganda, of the press agent, the lobbyist, the public relations man, the demagogue and the Cominform The average citizen in every nation and most of all in the U.S is bombarded constantly by propaganda and press releases designed to cloud his judgment, appeal to his prejudices, fill him with deliberate misinformation for a calculated... writers and American generals such as Stilwell The fire of propaganda ahout "Chiang, the corrupt fascist" later spread to Britain, and here it % MARKED WHILE ENGAGED IN THE LOST ART OF READING received additional encouragement from capitalist traders who hoped that China would "break up." Where Borodin failed, this worked GEORGE CATLIN in The New Leader While we've had casualties and it's been a terrifically... "protected" by a conscripted army of Americans plus military installations, costing hundreds of millions each year-all this in addition to the heavy toll in lives, materiel and· money taken by the Korean fiasco a short distance away.] Through force of circumstance, the British have had to face the realities of modern warfare They cannot afford the luxury of pretending that the three main elements of defense-air,... population is least numerous and where the strategic links to Great Russia are weakest It is an additional irony that the precise opposite of this has come about, partly because Franklin Roosevelt preferred to scuttle Chiang (the erstwhile "gallant fighter against Fascism") for the beaux yeux of Generalissimo Stalin, and partly because Chiang was confron~ed with intrigues against him by American writers . copy in The State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library LC# 72-174234 ISBN 0-405-00416-8 The Right Wing Individualist Tradition in America ISBN for complete set: 0-405-00410-9 See last pages of this volume for titles. Manufactured in the United States of America A New Pattern for a Tired World I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I A NEW PATTERN for A TIRED WORLD by LOUIS BROMFIELD HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS New York A NEW PATTERN FOR A TIRED WORLD Copyright, '954, by Louis. interested in punishing our enemies and we had a war psychosis-whatever you want to call it-and we. didn't realize that what had happened is that Japan and Germany had dropped out as world powers