Magyar H. P. Lovecraft Portál - hplovecraft.hu
Journal and the New Deal, The
Szerző: Howard Phillips Lovecraft • Év: 1934
One cannot question the patriotism shown by the Journal and Bulletin in its recent series of
distinctly alarmed editorials against the implications of America’s “New Deal”. Prominent names,
resonant abstractions, and inherited political slogans are potent factors in a certain type of opinionholding; and a synthesis of images including Thomas Jefferson (whom the Hamiltonian of our day so
devoutly invoke), “the historic American system”, “sturdy character and deep wisdom of the
founders”, “liberal democracy”, “individual’s control of his destiny”, “economic law”, “sound
financing”, just plain “freedom”, and other old reliables is admittedly hard for a good schoolbook
traditionalist to resist—especially if he chance to represent the complacent textile oligarchy which
has always flourished (despite irrelevant hardships and incidental starvation elsewhere) amidst this
sturdy form of human liberty.
Such an altruistic concern for freedom is by no means new. In the middle of the eighteenth
century many prosperous Americans who had done well under a colonial system dictated by the
different conditions of earlier experience were eagerly ready to echo the Journal’s quotation that
“great realms are only maintained with the same means whereby they were created”; and to point
out, like the Journal, that the country had (despite many incidents of awkwardly contrary
indications) “seen no necessity to recast the fundamental form of its institutions in the span of five
generations”. It is evident that they were equally devoted to the type of individual character
moulded by their especial political system, and that they firmly fancied all decent subjects were
with them. In the face of agitation by wild radicals and New-Dealers—a mere scholar and [. . .] like
Dr. Franklin, ill-informed and anchorless upstarts like Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and James
Otis, and shrewd politicians at home like William Pitt and Edmund Burke—these solid aristocrats
would have understood the Journal today when it preaches: “An attempt is now being made by
people in authority to start this country along the road to regimentation in violation of the American
tradition. As realisation of what is happening dawns on the people, resistance grows stronger. It is
our firm belief that Americans do not want that way,” and so on.
The parallel is startlingly exact. Between 1776 and 1778 the colonials who had lost sight of the
relationship of the emergence of their troubles to the destructive forces of the French and Indian
wars, and who, trusting [not only to the] economy and scheme of things, but also to the
opportunities for reform and progress, as well as for recovery, that lay in the path of the old order,
were philanthropically furnished with an admirable guide to sound traditional thinking—which took
the form of a press propaganda not at all unlike the Journal’s present campaign. Mr. Ambrose
Serle, an Under Secretary of State for the Colonies who had come to America in 1774, took charge
of the newspapers of New York in an effort to show the people what a “false conception” underlay
their “idea that the whole world had changed” and that a New Deal was necessary. He anticipated
the substance if not the literary tone of his future colleague’s cry, “We do not believe that human
nature is susceptible to such change. We believe that the American plan of life was sound. We
recognise its grievous faults and we would want to see the attempt to remedy them. But we do not
believe that the remedy is to be found in an entire recasting of our political institutions and of our
philosophical basis of life.” Like the Jeffersonian Republicans of our local mill-owning dynasty, lie
thought that the substitution of any new rule for that of the existing eupatrids was a blasphemous
blow at human rights; Shrudway [?] in his career embodies this belief in the now scarce pamphlet
printed in London in 1775; “Americans Against Liberty; or, an Essay on the Nature and Principles
of True Freedom, shewing that the Designs and Conduct of the Americans tends only to Tyranny
and Slavery.”
There is some general knowledge of the limited extent to which this older propaganda took
effect, hence it is not likely that the Journal is too hopeful about its own Canute-like (or, as B. K. H.
might say, Partritonian) assault on the waves of popular feeling. The Spenglers of Westminster and
Eddy Streets, whatever their wistful ideals may be, are hardly likely to repeat in private their public
gesture of confounding the wants of the propertied minority representing “business” with the wants
of the American people as a whole. Indeed, the slightly frantic temper of the recent editorials
betrays more than an inkling of their actual perception.
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Magyar H. P. Lovecraft Portál - hplovecraft.hu
What, then, are the real facts regarding the present economic situation and the attitude of the
American people toward it? First of all, let us not try to imagine any unbiassed person as blind to
the truth that basic social and industrial conditions are indeed profoundly, irrevocably changed. We
know, despite the clever smoke screens of the property-guarders, that the “founding fathers” lived
in a world infinitely different from ours; a world of scanty resources, slow production, difficult
communication, and blind, rule-of-thumb social and administrative ideas. In such a world there
were not nearly enough resources to go around among the population, while the production of what
did exist involved the labour of the whole people aside from tradition-sanctioned parasite classes.
Different regions were not interdependent, and the slow, scanty processes of primitive agriculture
and handicraft enabled virtually everyone to find a market for what he produced. Any number of
separate persons could compete in the same line without serious mutual encroachment.
Here were a set of real conditions to be met in a realistic way, and it is probable that Thomas
Jefferson (whose real philosophy was antipathetic to that of our modern Hamiltons of Monticello)
dealt with them as wisely as they could be dealt with. If there is any “great American tradition” or
“uniquely American philosophy” aside from demagogic and plutocratic platitudes, it is just that—to
deal rationally with whatever set of actual conditions may at any period exist, with the benefit of
the entire population—not that of merely the most fortunate or most naturally acquisitive part of
it—as a goal. Jefferson was no such oaf as to imagine that conditions can be always the same, or
that any specific policy has an intrinsic value when it ceases to do what it was meant to do. It is
another school that elevates certain temporary economic trends into eternal and inimitable
economic “laws”, and that claims some mystical continued efficacy for sundry fixed methods long
after the total vanishment of the state of things to which they were applicable.
What is really of permanence in a nation’s fibre and folkways is not in detail what the group does,
but what it wants and how resourceful it is in getting it, whatever the surrounding conditions and
the processes they may happen to call for. In the case of the United States the ‘usual, spiritual, and
institutional forms which have made a people’s character great and which must be husbanded and
preserved’ are not typified by a certain liberal course of laissez-faire acquisition which was once
effective but which is now a mere cloak for the grabbing of eighty per cent of the common
resources by two percent of the people. They are, rather, typified by the resolve which lay behind
Mr. Jefferson’s pragmatic course of the moment—to give the whole population a chance to acquire
a decent share of the country’s wealth, and to defeat any obstacle to such sharing. He who would
follow the real national tradition will do as Jefferson himself would do in similar circumstances—not
as he happened to do in other circumstances.
There is no need to belittle the general type of character which developed under the early
American conditions of scanty resources, isolation, and personal competition in primitive
agriculture and handicraft. Though we may well question whether other modes of training could
not produce equal stamina and resourcefulness, we can rest satisfied with the stamina and
resourcefulness produced. And if we tend to criticise the exaltation of merely acquisitive qualities,
and the ugly spirit of ruthlessness prevailing under such conditions of ceaseless material struggle,
the meagreness of life, we must remember that no other conditions were possible in the given time
and place. Our only mistake would be to idealise, per se, this peculiar type of character and the
influences which shaped it—to deny that its virtues could otherwise be achieved, to be totally blind
to its faults, and to fancy that even its virtues are worth sacrificing everything else for. It served its
function. It may well survive and serve in the future. But sensible Americans know that the
preservation of this precise type of temperament is a far less important matter than feeding all the
people and seeing that the channels of honourable employment are kept open to them—through
governmental regulation and even collective ownership and non-profit operation if it could [not] be
done otherwise.
The time for sentimental traditional frills is past. People will not support a social order which
gives them no chance to share in its fruits. A whole population working and eating according to a
planned economy is a nobler and more American thing than a limited nucleus of “old time rugged
individualists” prospering [while] an increasing unemployable minority starve or languish on a
degrading dole. The preceding administration of irrate[?] Hamiltons in Jefferson’s clothing grudged
even the dole, preferring a policy of starvation for the sake of abstract principle . . . but Americans
have shewn what they think of that administration.
But of course the most absurd and inexcusable sophistry is that which wilfully obscures the facts
and pretends that a rationally planned order would destroy the individuals chances for personal
advancement . . . as if our diabolic ‘Brain Trust’ were devising a system whereby stevedores,
professors, money-changers, artists, engineers, technological experts, physicians, coal-heavers,
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Magyar H. P. Lovecraft Portál - hplovecraft.hu
lawyers, plumbers, administrators, executives, elevator boys, and editorial writers would receive a
precisely or approximately equal return per hour or day for their services in the form of food cards
or certificates. The naiveté of such an assumption ought to be obvious to any sane reader—and
indeed, a reader with any degree of reflectiveness will likewise perceive that no system of reward
could be less just or rational than the one now existing. The qualities which in the old order have
enabled one to “get ahead” in the “noble American way” include many of the least admirable in all
human nature—greed, low shrewdness, ruthlessness, duplicity, and other things—and exclude some
of the most admirable. Who can sensibly idealise a system which keeps many college professors in
semi- [poverty] while bestowing needless surpluses of resources and dangerous quotas of power
upon coarse-grained traders and cash-jugglers and parasites who contribute nothing to society?
Not that this state of things can ever be fully corrected—but merely that we need not lament its
possible modification. It is a foregone conclusion that a rationalised social order would graduate
rewards to fit quality and extent of service. The able and faithful would win much; the incapable
and indolent would win little. Willing workers would be above compulsion—and who would resent
the application of compulsion, if thought best, to the voluntary buns? What would be absent, would
be the absurd and needless financial surpluses now possessed by the lucky and by the capably
acquisitive—those surpluses which mean hidden power, and which, from the dawn of the machine
age until the New Deal, made our nominal republic a mere tool of rapacious industry and finance.
No wonder the holders of this unwarranted power—who palliate their policy now and then with
spectacular charities and public services—fight blindly and bitterly against all attempts to install a
fairer order. One does not blame them—but one does not pay very much attention to them any
more.
The denial of our standpatters that any change has taken place since the days of the constitution
of 1789 is really too ridiculous for refutation. Anyone with half an eye can see what has happened
and what is still happening; how the world of scanty resources, slow production, difficult
communication, and blind, empirical sociology and administration has given place to a world with
infinite though undistributed resources, limitless production and duplication with a minimum of
labour, complete boundary-obliteration through rapid communication, and a social knowledge and
administrative technique altering our whole approach to man and his problems. What precise policy
of one hundred forty-five years ago, surviving from another world, can deal with this seething
vortex of unprecedented conditions?
We know that through machinery the whole basic relationship between the individual and
industry has been radically and irrevocably metamorphosed; that under a laissez-faire system
enterprise and stamina can henceforth yield rewards only to a picked section of the people, while
millions remain permanently unemployable. We know that large-scale, distance-covering
organisation has concentrated all markets within a few potent hands, and that these hands are the
real governing forces of the “free” republic so hypocritically lauded by their possessors. We know
that this centralisation of wealth and power has resulted in the unspeakable oppression and
starvation of millions of the unfortunate—and this in the most prosperous times. It is not merely the
depression which has proved the dying order unworkable. And we know that the private holders of
the needlessly concentrated wealth and power will never voluntarily rectify the conditions which
their unrestricted greed for profit creates. They have had their chance and failed. So the only thing
left to do is to regulate them through the pressure of the whole social order. What society has
supinely allowed them to [do] in the past, society must control and modify in the future.
It is clear that any machine world left to the control of vested business (and how hypocritical to
call such a world a world of “free individualism”!) will never be able to offer employment to the
whole population; will never, that is, make it possible for a man to feel that his willing labour is
certain to win him food and shelter. It is the fashion for plutocratic apologists to prove [?] this
condition as a laudable strengthener of national fibre. “We don’t wish to be coddled by
governmental agencies when our own effort fails.” What if a few million do die off? The survivors
will be much better examples of the “virile American tradition of struggle and competition”!
Unfortunately for the plutocrats and their apologists, the American people do not seek quite so high
a degree of Lacedaemonian distinction through martyrdom as their self-constituted definers and
ostentatious idealisers would have us believe. On the contrary, they consider it much better to eat
and be concrete men than to starve and be abstract demigods. Hence the vote of November 8, 1932
against the seated examplars of Menenius Agrippa’s doctrine.
We know today that nothing will restore the pre-machine condition of reasonably universal
employment save an artificial allocation of working hours involving the use of more men than
formerly to perform a given task. Hardy men of “traditional American fibre” can scarcely get jobs
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when none are left, and can scarcely depend on the sporadic freaks of luxury consumption under
forced sales which occasionally create new production-demands of drop-in-bucket magnitude. Jobs
must be spread, and the pay of each must not drop below a living wage no matter how much profit
it destroys. It is more important to spread living-wage jobs than to assure profit to private industry.
If industry cannot stand the reduction, it must cease to be private industry. “Business” is an
abstraction worth nobody’s worship. The primary function of society, in spite of all the sophistries
spurred of selfishness, is to give men better conditions than they could get without it; and the basic
need today is for jobs for all—not for “property” for a few of the lucky and the acquisitive. One may
add, of course, that unemployment insurance and old-age pensions are likewise integral parts of
any sane social programme. With all these decently civilised measures acting together, there is a
chance to salvage our swiftly declining society from the chaos of revolution and possible barbarism
otherwise awaiting it.
In view of the urgent need for change, there is something almost obscene in the chatter of the
selfish about various psychological evils allegedly inherent in a New Deal promising decent
economic security and humane leisure for all instead of for a few. According to our Spartan
reactionaries, nothing but the constant threat of starvation makes a man (unless he be a privileged
inheritor) noble and hardy, while any daily programme not using up all his time and vitality in illpaid work for others’ profit leads (save in the case of millionaires) directly to effeminate decadence.
It is really hardly necessary to answer such overt puerility.
What is worth answering is the kindred outcry about “regimentation”, “collective slavery”,
“violation of Anglo-Saxon freedom”, “destruction of the right of the individual to make his own way”
and so on; with liberal references to Stalin, Hitler, Mustapha Kemal, and other extremist dictators
who have sought to control men’s personal, intellectual, and artistic lives, and traditional habits
and folkways, as well as their economic fortunes. Naturally the Anglo-Saxon balks at any
programme calculated to limit his freedom as a man and a thinker or to disturb his inherited
perspectives and daily customs—and need we say that no plan ever proposed in an Anglo-Saxon
country would conceivably seek to limit such freedom or disturb such perspectives and customs?
Here we have a deliberate smoke-screen—conscious and malicious confusion of terms. A decent
planned society would indeed vary to some extent the existing regulations (for there are such)
governing commercial and economic life. Yet who save a self-confessed Philistine or Marxist (the
plutocrat can cite “Das Kapital” for his purpose!) would claim that the details and conditions of our
merely economic activities form more than a trivial fraction of our whole lives and personalities?
That which is essential and distinctive about a man is not the routine of material struggle he
follows in his office; but the civilised way he lives, outside his office, the life whose maintenance is
the object of his struggle. So long as his office work gains him a decently abundant and
undisputedly free life, it matters little what that work is—what the ownership of the enterprise, and
what and how distributed its profits, if profits there be. We have seen that no system proposes to
deny skill and diligence an adequate remuneration. What more may skill and diligence legitimately
ask? Nor is any lessening in the pride of achievement contemplated. Man will thrill just as much at
the overcoming of vast obstacles, and the construction of great works, whether his deeds be
performed for service or for profit. As it is, the greatest human achievements have never been for
profit. Would Keats or Newton or Lucretius or Einstein or Santayana flourish less under a rationally
planned society? Any intimation that a man’s life is wholly his industrial life, and that a planned
economic order means a suppression of his personality, is really both a piece of crass ignorance and
an insult to human nature. Incidentally, it is curious that no one has yet pointed to the drastically
regulated economic life of the early Mass. Bay colony as something “American”!
One need not here go into the numberless minor evils of unsupervised and uncoordinated private
industry—the waste involved in duplication, the low-grade ideals of material success, speed, and
quantity involved in ceaseless competition, the false standards and psychology resulting from “highpressure salesmanship” and needless consumption to swell plutocratic profits, the contemptible
dishonesty and charlatanic ignominiousness of business advertising ballyhoos, and countless
kindred overtones of the rugged ancien regime. One may only say that, if we are ever rid of these
things, we shall indeed be well rid of them!
The reactionaries’ treatment of the democracy fetish merits more attention. Here again is a
deliberate hypocrisy and confusion of issues. Realists today know that the current problems of
government, in detail, are all matters of such technological involvedness and administrative
complexity that no layman can even begin to cope with them; while only a broadly educated layman
can hope to do as much as understand what they are really about. The Old Dealers pretended to
deny this and ‘kidded’ the voters into thinking they could intelligently pass on such
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problems—meanwhile exercising all actual control themselves through carefully arranged
nominations, elections, briberies, manipulations of legislature, injunctions, and cognate devices of
rugged, unspoiled Jeffersonians. There was no democracy under the Old Deal, though there was a
vast lot of flatulent talk about it. The New Deal is less hypocritical. It admits that laymen cannot
cope directly with complex issues, and does not try to fool anybody in the matter. It leaves decision
and action to intelligently selected commissions really capable of deciding and acting, and tries to
whittle down the hampering of procedure by the irresponsible.
And yet, for all that, there is infinitely more genuine democracy—if that means anything—in the
New Deal than there ever was in the Old; for the present order admits the right of the whole people
to choose goals—which was never possible, save in theory, before. It is the people who say what to
do. The experts, taking orders, try to get it done in their own trained way without interference.
Naturally they make mistakes and have to go in many cases by trial and error; but who could do
otherwise under unprecedented conditions, and with the savage obstructiveness of reactionaries
always present? Could the crowd of blundering laymen and their equally blundering
representatives help them?
Most disingenuous of all the Journal’s complaints is that which concerns the attempt of the New
Dealers to introduce political reforms under the old governmental exterior. There is rare irony in
this carping, considering the extent to which the old plutocracy ruled behind a representative
mask, but this one may pass over. The real truth is, of course, that no one can yet know in detail
just what needs to be done, or how far along the road to collective ownership of major resources it
will be necessary to go. The present is a time of imperative experiment, and it would be a sheer
waste to map out modified governmental fabrics which newly discovered conditions might force us
to supersede at once. Any government of really civilised nature is rationally flexible, and will permit
us to experiment with new lines of direction when conditions change, until we finally strike on
something of genuinely permanent benefit. When we do find such a stable plan, there is no question
but that all the formal constitutional framework will be brought into consistency with it; but the
matter calls for no haste. The undue concern of our Tories about this point is typical of their
tendency to live in sonorous abstractions (save where their own overfed purses are concerned)
rather than in tangible realities.
It is no purpose of the present commentator to belittle the achievements of the past’s unequal
society in building up cultural standards which could not otherwise have existed when resources
were few and production slow. Plainly, the concentration of wealth and power among the stronger
and luckier [members ofj humanity was justified at a time when a fairer distribution would have
impoverished all and prevented the growth of such race-advancing refinements as depend on
leisure, plenty, and authority. It is because resources are now plentiful, permitting of fair
distribution without any lowering of the cultural standards of the highest classes, that a policy of
continued economic disproportion has become so wholly indefensible.
The gradual yielding of such a policy to a fairer and more workable scheme must not be looked
upon as anything really artificial or unnatural. After all, it will be merely the continuance of the old
process of adapting methods to conditions, with very little of basic importance in life even touched.
The balance of focus has shifted, so that economic elements must shift in consonance in order to
achieve a fresh state of stable equilibrium. Of the general recognition of the shift and its demands,
both among the masses and among the disinterested thinking minority, there can be no longer any
question. If left to ethical grounds alone, the recognition would have been slower; but the acute
needs emphasised by the depression have crystallised liberal opinion very rapidly. Much of this
opinion, unfortunately, leans over backward into the doubtful zone of equalitarian communism; but
the best way to prevent excess in that direction—an excess which any forcible revolution would be
likely to enthrone—is to follow that milder course which Nature seems to mark out, and which most
of the New Dealers in Washington appear to be following to a gratifying extent.
And so, though a sincere admirer of the Journal and Bulletin’s news and literary standards, a
third-generation subscriber without other daily informative pabulum, and a product of an
hereditarily Republican and conservative background, the writer must register dissent from the
heated periods of the editorial genius whose alarm for the public liberties is so touching. It is
impossible not to see in such an alarm the blind defensive gesture of vested capital and its
spokesmen as distinguished from the longer-range thought which recognises historic change,
values the essence instead of the surface forms of human quality, and tests its appraisals by
standards deeper than those of mere convention and recent custom.
That any part of this outburst will be put into print, the writer is not ingenuous enough to fancy
even for a moment. It is, rather, a kind of emotional catharsis which will serve its utmost end of
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real[?] thought far enough to establish its accord with the numerous throng of similar “rays” which
the recent volley of plutocratic patriotism must have evoked. Perhaps the massed result of all these
replies will be to give the fusiliers of freedom a slightly clearer idea of what the general American
public values as its real tradition, and what it is determined to get—peacefully if possible—despite
the flag-waving abstractions and solicitous altruism of old-time business and finance.
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