No More Learning

B. Krause, Organisation von Arbeit und Wirtschaft (Berlin, 1935),
P-75-
13 Gignoux, Patrons, soyez des patrons!
? 864 SOCIAL POLICIES
in its relationships with small business, and of "business men" in their relationships with the general public. The term "capitalist" has largely disappeared from such business literature, and or- ganizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Federation of British Industries, not to mention the academi- cally highly reputable National Bureau of Economic Research, no longer use it at all. Mr. Virgil Jordan, head of the National Indus- trial Conference Board, has repeatedly argued in a series of widely quoted speeches that businessmen lead through the "enterprise system" as the "only trustworthy custodian[s] of the sole basis of prosperity and security of the American public, which is their capi- tal resources and their working capacity. " ^*
This leadership of militant big business is most commonly and easily justified as a "technical" necessity. It is held, that is to say, to be a system of guidance by the intellectually equipped and so- cially able--a society run for the good of all by an elite caste of experts. This theme appears over and over again, and with increas- ing frequency in the literature of the Spitzenverbdnde. Practically all leading big-business spokesmen are agreed on the underlying argument. One runs, not infrequently, into direct analogies to Plato's system of government by "experts" (argued, needless to say, without benefit of Plato's propertyless communism of the leader guardians) . ^^ Sometimes, and this is particularly true of the Italian and American business literature, "leader" ranks are held to be continuously renewed and invigorated by a process of selec-
14 Virgil Jordan, "The Economic Outlook" (American Management Association, Personnel Series, No. 29, 1937), pp. 20-21.
15 The idea of a society run by experts is, of course, quite old. Plato was the first scientific millennialist, but the Republic was largely the Periclean aristocrat's version of the "saturn legend," in itself as old as all prehistoric and primitive myths of a "golden age" of past or future. Following Plato, one finds the scientific Utopias of Leibnitz, Campanella, Andrea, Granvil, Bacon, Hooke, the Encyclopedists in gen- eral, the naive positivism of Comte (and the somewhat more skeptical positivism of Hume and Bayle), Bellamy, Kropotkin, Veblen (Engineers and the Price System), and many others--not to mention the "Technocrats" and Mr. H. G. Wells. But Plato's system was not merely a harking back to the days of agricultural aristocracy, reformed under the guidance of "experts" as the ideal "Republic. " The new system was a regimented slavocracy and it was launched as a criticism of the leveling tendencies of his time. Democracy was the real enemy in this demos. See the article by Gregory Vlastos in Philosophical Review, May, 1941. The same holds for Mr. Lawrence Dennis' system of rule by the "elite" and Mr. James Burnham's "manager- rulers. " See also the rather savagely whimsical caricature of such regimentation by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World (New York, 1932).
--
? SOCIAL POLICIES 265
tive cooptation, or a sort of institutionalized adoption of the able
from below. The Japanese have formalized such a system in select-
ing their plant and enterprise managers {Banto) is a fashion quite
reminiscent of the Undershaft foundlings in Bernard Shaw's bril-
liant dramatic production, Major Barbara. This practice of ab-
sorbing the able from the socially inferior ranks, first advocated by
Plato in his famous metals analogy, is in line with Pareto*s concept
of the "circulating elite," which now plays such an important part
in the Biblical literature of Italian Fascism. The idea has been re-
produced in the writings of numerous spokesmen for the Nazis,^(R)
in various books by Lawrence Dennis in America, and in one form
or another by Link, Carrel, Pitkin, and others. It has appeared on
many occasions in the Proceedings of the National Association of
Manufacturers as proof of the existence of "democracy in busi-
^'
ness. "
Outside of the United States--but, more recently, here also--the
notion of the technical superiority of the upper managerial layers has, as indicated in the literature and programs of many militant business spokesmen, been giving way to the idea that through long but cumulative processes of biosocial selection these same layers are coming to represent a self-evident and scientifically demonstra- ble elite of innate, hereditary, biomental superiority. The transi-
16 Especially interesting in this connection are the Nazi "Junker" schools, a sort of party-ideological, graduate seminar system, modeled, apparently, somewhat after a combination of Plato's recommendations for the training of future Guardians, and the Janissaries recruited by the Turks from the select amongst the conquered Chris- tian youth. But the future "Junkers"--they graduate with this honored tide appear to be selected almost exclusively from the upper social layers of landed nobil- ity, industrial baronry, military hierarchy, and party functionaries.
17 See NAM pamphlets and other literature on "Industry and You," "The Amer- ican Way," etc. Selection in such a manner, of course, has nothing whatever to do with "democracy. " "Equality of opportunity," so long as it means an equal chance of being selected for advancement by the governing hierarchy--in itself apparently be- coming more difficult within the higher business ranks of the liberal-capitalistic countries (see p. 273)--has no more to do with "democracy" than had the recruiting of the Janissaries by the Turks, or the advancement procedures of an officer-caste army or the Catholic hierarchy. "Democracy" is a political concept that has to do with the location of power to formulate policies, determine objectives, and check administration under policy directives; it implies nothing directly regarding the mechanics of recruitment, and it is wholly alien to systems of graduated subservience. The correlation between "ability" and position may under certain circumstances ap- pear to be the same under democracy and under "leader" hierarchies answerable only to themselves, but the location of power and the objectives pursued necessarily place them poles apart.
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tion from the one to the other position is taken by easy stages. From the belief that, left to themselves and undisturbed by "blind leaders of the blind" (as Virgil Jordan likes to characterize militant labor leaders and liberal champions of popular causes), "the common . . . and . . . working people of this country follow their natural leaders, the owners and managers of industry," ^^ it requires no great stretch of the imagination to argue that selective breeding of the able will ultimately develop a real aristocracy of brains and culture. It is then simple to conclude, conversely, that the lower orders of society will inevitably settle to those several social- occupational levels which their relative inheritance factors in glands, genes, chromosomes and cortical layers select for them.
One of the earliest American expressions ^^ of this attitude asso- ciated with the rise of monopoly-capitalism was The Passing of the Great Race (1916), written by a prominent New York corporation attorney, Madison Grant, largely out of a book which was for a long time unknown except by scholars--Houston Stewart Cham- berlain's ^^ Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Chamber- lain's book, based upon a thesis advanced by a French nobleman, de Gobineau, has been resurrected by Alfred Rosenberg as the foundation for his "Myth of the Twentieth Century," the central thesis of which is the racial superiority of the Germanic or "Nordic" stock. Madison Grant was a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York; his book has a Preface by Henry Fairfield Osborn. ^^ The book states a number of theses which, in a somewhat altered form, have since secured such wide and tacit--if not always explicit--acceptance in upper business circles, that they are worth quoting at some length:
Modern anthropology has demonstrated that racial lines are not only absolutely independent of both national and linguistic groupings, but that in many cases these racial lines cut through them at sharp angles
r-
18 Report of the Committee on Employment Relations of the NAM> 1926.
19 Ignoring, of course, the leaders of early (pre-business monopoly) American Tory
opinion such as Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and Daniel Webster.
20 Chamberlain was a hyphenate German of English parentage, having moved to
Germany at an early age.
21 Curator of the Natural History Museum. He wrote, "If I were asked: What is
the greatest danger which threatens the American republic today? I would certainly reply: The gradual dying out among our people of those hereditary traits through which the principles of our religious, political, and social foundations were laid
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and correspond closely with the divisions of social cleavage. The great lesson of the science of race is the immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with which is closely associated the immutability of psychical predispositions and impulses. This continuity of inheritance has a most important bearing on the theory of democracy and still more upon that of socialism, and those engaged in social uplift and in revolu- tionary movements are consequently usually very intolerant of the limi- tations imposed by heredity.
Democratic theories of government in their modern form are based on dogmas of equality formulated some hundred and fifty years ago, and rest upon the assumption that environment and not heredity is the controlling factor in human development. Philanthropy and noble pur- pose dictated the doctrine expressed in the Declaration of Independ- ence, the document which today constitutes the actual basis of American institutions. The men who wrote the words, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," were themselves the own- ers of slaves, and despised the Indians as something less than human.
. . . In America we have nearly succeeded in destroying the privilege of birth; that is, the intellectual and moral advantage a man of good stock brings into the world with him. We are now engaged in destroying the privilege of wealth; that is, the reward of successful intelligence and industry, and in some quarters there is developing a tendency to attack the privilege of intellect and to deprive a man of the advantages of an early and thorough education. . . . True aristocracy is a government by the wisest and best, always a small minority in any population. Hu- man society is like a serpent dragging its long body on the ground, but with the head always thrust a little in advance and a little elevated above the earth. The serpent's tail, in human society represented by the anti-social forces, was in the past dragged by sheer force along the path of progress. 22
The dogmatic racism of this statement has largely lost caste out- side of Germany and Japan. -^ But overlooking this element, we find here a four-fold correlation that is rapidly gaining favor among the social theorists who serve the reactionary leader ranks of highly organized business: (1) physiological characteristics are identified with (2) psychomental capacities, which combination is held to
down, and their insidious replacement by traits of less noble character. " Osborn was particularly worried about the colored races, and the influx of immigrants from south-eastern Europe.
22 Passing of the Great Race (New York, 1916), pp. xv-xvi, 6, 7. At the time he wrote the book Grant was Chairman of the New York Zoological Society, Trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, and Councilor of the American Geo- graphical Society.
23 Leading exceptions are books by Lothrop Stoddard and Albert Edward Wiggin.
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(3) circumscribe and limit the social-occupational status of the major wealth and income brackets, for each of which there is sup- posed to be (4) an appropriate social doctrine of greatest appeal. According to this thesis the "elite" think aristocratically while the "morons, culls, perverts," upon whom Mr. Pitkin pours the vials of his wrath, are needlessly deluded by the "white lie" of democ- racy and come to think socialistically or "bolshevistically. " ^^ The latter cannot produce the necessary genius to command, argues Mr. Carrel,^^ and a "democracy" which offers them such participa- tion is a will-o'-the-wisp they may follow only into the abysmal swamps of hopeless failure. Thus one comes to the painful con- clusion that any social order shaped to meet the vain hopes of the undisciplined "rabble" can only be the "irreconcilable foe of free- dom, the inevitable oppressor of talent and distinction. " ^^
No one any longer questions that ideas such as these dominate the social thinking of the upper business circles of Germany, Italy, and
2* ". . . most well-mannered debaters carry on with the White Lie of Democracy; and thus reach worthless conclusions. A land swarming with tens of millions of morons, perverts, culls, outcasts, criminals, and lesser breeds of low-grade humans cannot escape the evils all such cause. . . . So long as we have an underworld of 4,000,000 or more scoundrels willing to do anything for a price, and a twilight world of fully 40,000,000 people of profound stupidity or ignorance, or indifference, and a population of nearly 70,000,000 who cannot support themselves entirely and hence must think first of cost, whenever they buy things, we shall have a nasty mess on our hands. " Walter B. Pitkin, Let's Get What We Want (New York, 1935), pp. 72, 283. This book has had an extraordinarily wide sale amongst militant business circles.
25 ". . . most of the members of the proletarian class owe their situation to the hereditary weakness of their organs and their mind. . . . Today, the weak should not be artificially maintained in wealth and power. It is imperative that social classes should be synonymous with biological classes. Each individual must rise or sink to the level for which he is fitted by the quality of his tissues and of his soul. The social ascension of those who possess the best organs and the best minds should be aided. Each one must have his natural place. Modern nations will save themselves by developing the strong. Not by protecting the weak. " Alexis Carrel, Man the Un- known (New York, 1935), p. 298. This book, likewise, enjoyed a phenomenal sale throughout the business world, and reviews in business journals were uniformly laudatory in the highest degree. The head of one of the largest advertising com- panies in America was so impressed with its "social doctrine" that he at one time proposed that Mr. Henry Ford be asked to subsidize a cheap printing so that the book might be read by every businessman in America.
28 "Is democracy the left hand of freedom--or is it a moist gorilla paw that grasps free manhood by the gorge? Democracy is the irreconcilable foe of freedom, the inevitable oppressor of talent and distinction. " John Corbin, The Return of the Middle Classes (New York, 1922). A similar idea runs through many of Mr. Bruce Barton's speeches (see, e. g. , his parable of the "golf handicap").
? SOCIAL POLICIES 269
Japan. 2^ Nor is there much doubt that the caste-like sentiments of the same circles in Tory England and Bourbon France are stamped with a similar die. But readers unfamiliar with the records might well be surprised to discover for how long, and how generally like ideas have run through certain American business literature. Three samples, fairly representative of the run of the mill, may be cited, two directly from National Association of Manufacturers sources, and the third from a theoretical summary of vocational selection experts.
In a novel published serially (1913) in American Industries, of- ficial publication of the NAM, Mr. David M. Parry, long president of the Association and formulator in 1903 of its bitterly antilabor code--from which the NAM has never retreated ^^--has a character assail "this cursed Democracy--this damnable Democracy which like an octopus with a million tentacles is throttling the manhood of our entire race. " ^^ The story is confessedly of the order of para- ble, being the tale of a fabled "Atlantis" in which are highlighted what Mr. Parry feels to be the evils of his own America. He ends his allegory with the comment that his fanciful narrative, though "crudely told . . . has the merit of veracity. " Through it, he wrote, he feels "right glad" that "I have done my duty according to my light in preserving for mankind an account of the nation that through its worship of Social Equality went down to destruction. "
Parry's homily appeared in the midst of a great deal of specula- tion about rising social unrest. One of the great correctives hoped for by himself and his colleagues was that the educational system might be so reorganized and reshaped that each class would--much as the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, and Epsilons in Aldous Huxley's phantom Brave New World--be properly routed to those occupa- tional tasks for which its members were bio-mentally most adapted. Thus has arisen special interest, for example, in certain uses which can be made by company-controlled apprentice-training plans. Running throughout the literature of the NAM and foreign paral- lel bodies from their very earliest days has been this special em- phasis. Typical in the American literature is the following analysis:
27 See, in particular, Kolnai, The War against the West.
28 See Chapter VI, footnote 77, above. 29 "The Scarlet Empire. "
--
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according to an official spokesman for the NAM, there are "Three Kinds of Children," for whom there must be "Three Kinds of
^^
The abstract-minded and imaginative children . . . learn readily from the printed page. Most of the children whose ancestors were in the professions and the higher occupations, so-called, are of this class, as well as many from the humbler callings [concept of the "circulating elite"].
Theconcrete,orhand-mindedchildren . . . thosewhocanonlywith extreme difficulty, and then imperfectly, learn from the abstractions of the printed page. These children constitute at least half of all the child life of the nation, being that half who leave our schools by the end of the sixth grade, with substantially no education beyond the imperfect command of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and a bit of domestic geography; that is, of the three R's, which, in themselves, are not educa- tion in any sense, but only the tools whereby education may be attained in the seventh, eighth and later grades, if at all all those studies which develop judgment, citizenship and efficiency coming in these higher grades.
The great intermediate class, comprising all degrees of efficiency from those who by the narrowest margin fall short of the requirements of the first class to those whose capabilities just save them from the third class.
For each of these bio-mentally delineated groups there was to
be an appropriate type of schooling: one type would keep the
"abstract-minded and imaginative" from becoming "impractical,
overzealous, unbalanced theorists, often referred to in reproach as
the educated class," ^^ while the other would place the "hand-
minded" in vocational schools under the guidance of social-elite
businessmen. "It is inevitable," argued another leading spokesman
for the NAM, "that a great responsibility for the real education of
the mass of people in this country lies with the business corpora-
32
tion. "
The third example of this attitude is taken from two specialists
in vocational guidance who have expressed, in a remarkable chart, conclusions regarding the correlation between "intelligence" and "occupational fitness. " This chart drawn by Fryer and Sparling, called "Corresponding Intelligence-Achievement Values," defines the "intelligence test," upon which the occupational classifications
&o Proceedings of the 17th Annual Convention (1912), pp. 149-77. (Italics mine. ) ^^Idem, ^2 Proceedings of the 88th Annual Meeting of the NAM, 1923.
Schools":
? SOCIAL POLICIES 271
reproduced in the chart are based, as "a measure of what the in- dividual has learned, from which can be predicted his capacity to learn in the future. " ^^ It is impossible to avoid the implication that the correlations established between occupation and "intel- ligence" are understood to rest upon assumptions of innate qualita- tive differences. ^*
The most interesting feature of this belief is the service it per- forms for the larger idea, that if each person in each class can be trained and fitted for that particular occupation for which he is innately adapted, then a "natural harmony" of graduated leader- led interests arises. By a further easy transition it appears to follow that organic relationships of a bio-functional character bind the different classes of society into the "scalar chain" in such a way that failure to perform properly at any one point throws the whole social metabolism out of gear. The final result amounts to this: led by the superior classes--more or less constantly renewed in strength and numbers by cooptation from the "sport" elite selectively bred from below--all social ranks team together to advance the good of all (as interpreted by the leaders) by enhancing the specific and unique good of each individual. And the specific and unique good of the individual is determined by his foreordained functional posi- tion in the organic body politic.
The underlying idea here is, in some respects at least, a curious combination of Smithian liberties, Benthamite hedonism, and Hobbesian social philosophy; this combination long served as the leading theoretical foundation for a lofty justification of the Nas- sau Senior version of socially irresponsible capitalistic activities moving within the orbital systems of "free competition" and "lais- sez faire. " In the blending, an underlying harmony was freely mixed with generalized contempt for the popular ranks. Bentham, like Hobbes before him and from whom he took many of his lead- ing ideas, despised the lower orders. Unlike Hobbes, however, he
33 Douglas Fryer and E. Sparling, "Intelligence and Occupational Adjustment," -- J.
Occupations The Vocational Guidance Magazine, June, 1934, pp. 55-63. Business- men are found in the upper "intelligence" ratings, but musicians and chemists, for example, do not do so well.
3* Just what does such a statement mean. Since what has been learned is considered solely in terms of achievement and without regard to the presence or absence of opportunities or environmental factors, the presumption is that one reads backwards from achievements to innate capacities.
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SOCIAL POLICIES
believed that "free choice" would elevate the superior and lower the dregs to their natural position. But in an hierarchically or- ganized society (such as Hobbes desired and whose formal authori- tarianism Bentham rejected), where advancement from below be- comes increasingly a matter of cooptation from above and where the wished-for pattern of social authority is coherent with the proto- typal leader-led systems of the spreading business corporation, military service, or clerical bureaucracy, it is not difficult to see how what was once recognized as a system of desirable "freedom" may be readily transmuted into a set of prescriptive dogmas in support of authoritative regimentation.
Three critical questions need to be answered at this point: (i) Is advancement into the upper social reaches of the several capitalistic countries becoming in fact more difficult? (2) Whether or no, and so far as the guiding business heads are concerned, is "leadership" in business circles interpreted by its spokesmen to mean rightful power to fix and determine the content of social economic policies uninhibited by independent "democratic" check from the ranks below? (3) Do these same circles believe that benevolent pater- nalism is freed of the taint of despotism merely because the basic issues may be so authoritatively and dexterously interpreted, the relevant facts so presented, and the symbols most deeply rooted in popular systems of value so manipulated that- the general populace can be made to "want" or appear to "want" to do whatever the self-perpetuating elite require of them?
The answer to the first question has largely been given. Within the totalitarian countries, not wholly excluding even the new layers of the party hierarchies, the upper social ranks are and have long been for all practical purposes closed to those below. To a lesser extent, but increasingly with the passage of time, the same seems to be true of the nontotalitarian countries. Studies by Sorokin and others in the United States seem to indicate clearly that arteries of vertical advancement are becoming fewer and more pinched as one approaches the top-flight business ranks.
^^ Somewhat the same thing appears to be true of many of the leading professions ^^ and
35 See, in particular, Maurice Dobb, Capitalist Enterprise and Social Progress (London, 1925), particularly Chapter IX, "Advantage and Class. "
36 The periods of training are becoming longer for doctors, lawyers, teachers and many others, and at the same time the living expenses are rising, tuition and labora-
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273
of most political careers. " But wherever vertical advancement is still common it comes more and more by the process of coopting from below, by circles which acknowledge no right of the populace to demand a direct accounting of either policies or execution of policies which affect its fortunes.
The answers to the second and third questions are clearly, and without important exception anywhere in the reactionary ranks of the capitalistic world, in the affirmative. "Democratic" check on all issues that reach to the roots of domination appears within these circles to be not only not the fulfillment, but the direct antagonist of genuine social "harmony. " Conversely, when freed from such restraints, the resultant appears to the "circulating elite" as the only satisfactory environment in which the life cycles of individ- uals and groups may work themselves out, as in short, the only real world of "freedom"--or even, "democracy. " As pointed out above, an official Italian propaganda publication of the Fascist Confedera- tion of Industrialists characteristically feels free to speak of Fas- cism as "authoritarian democracy. " A like theme of "responsibility to the public" runs through the Nazi literature. It is practically certain that if a coup d'etat ever comes in America from the right it will be advertised as a defense of democratic freedoms and a blow at Fascism. ^^
This "new democracy," however, is as strictly antiegalitarian as its "freedoms" are antilibertarian and its "liberties" authoritatively circumscribed. It is, in other words, the ideal of the old Platonic state dressed in somewhat new clothes and adapted to modern times. Under it policy decisions are made exclusively by the self- appointed "leader" ranks, and the lower social classes would be authoritatively directed on behalf of the "general welfare. " Many leading Nazi and Fascist writers have willingly acknowledged the old Greek master, though they usually prefer for obvious reasons to
tory fees are higher, the period of "starvation" after admittance to the prerogatives "of the cloth" longer, the dangers of unemployment greater.
37 Only a powerful political machine or a man of "independent" or more than average income can any longer afford to run for or hold the bulk of our current political offices. Long accepted as a principle abroad, we face the actuality in a more acute form with each passing decade here.
38 See the very interesting book by Harnett T. Kane, Louisiana Hayride (New York, 1941), dealing with the totalitarian regime of the late Huey Long, which he describes as an American "rehearsal for dictatorship. "
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SOCIAL POLICIES
avoid the term "Republic. " American readers are familiar with the concept in the writings of the preindustrial Federalist proponents of New England commercial and trading capitalism, and in the literature of the Calhoun school, which spoke for the planter aris- tocracy of the old South. It is a tribute to the astuteness of certain antidemocratic public-relations counselors that the contemporary literature of "welfare capitalism" has not been commonly recog- nized as cast from the same mold.
In this version, when all the classes of the projected social order have been properly educated, trained, and ideologically grounded, so that each learns to do his "bit" and perform his natural func- tion, then, to employ the contemporary jargon, "harmony reigns. " There is no point upon which the business literature of all the Spitzenverbdnde agree so completely as this. Without exception, social "harmony" between capital and labor is the leading theme song. And "harmony" is interpreted to mean "cooperation" and "unity" between business and the public, merchant and the farmer, big and little businesses, and between all other interests on the one hand, and the directors of big business and their organizations on the other. When implemented with an adequate propaganda, appropriately directed to meet the "needs" and peculiarities of each special interest, the new paternal society becomes to its pro- ponents not despotism but the Hobbesian natural order.
Plainly this "harmony" propaganda looks forward to a system of status, as may readily be seen by a brief resume of the evolving attitude of big business towards the problems of organized labor.
THE CONTENT OF "hARMONY" IN LABOR RELATIONS
"Prosperity Dwells Where Harmony Reigns" runs the caption of a series of outdoor posters addressed to public partisans of the militant employer cause and scattered by the National Association of Manufacturers from one end of the United States to another. The kernel of the Nazi concept of Gemeinschaft or "community feeling" in labor relations is one of "harmony" between the Fiihrer (employer-"leader") and his Gefolgschaft or "followers. " The essence of the relationship is said to be "harmony," "goodwill," "mutual duties an(J responsibilities," and these express an "or-
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275
ganic" interdependence which requires absence of difference of opinion, conflicting organizations, and competing interests. The "National Harmonizing Society" of Japan views these matters in a similar light.
Gignoux, the militant author of Patrons, soyez des Patrons! (Em- ployers, Be Employers! ), and president of the violently anti-labor Confederation Generale du Patronat Fran^ais (General Confed- eration of French Employers), told his employer-following in 1937, that "you are not only responsible for your own concerns but for those of your colleagues and to those to whom you delegate a part of your authority. . . . You are the heads; you not only have charge of men but souls. " ^(R) The reorganizers of the new "corporate order" in Petain's decapitated empire looked first to "union" in the form of "loyal cooperation" between employer and employee, and then, without change of pace, to "collaboration" between con- quering Germany and conquered France. A speaker before the National Association of Manufacturers in 1923 referred to Mus- solini as "without question of doubt one of the big men of Europe
today" for his vigorous action in discharging workmen who were not reconciled to the harmony between capital and labor provided under decree by the new Fascist government*? --a harmony founded, as an official eulogist in a widely circulated pamphlet*^ has floridly expressed the matter, on the principle of the "illu- minated and disinterested control of capital and labor by means of the cooperative-corporative binomial destined to produce a stable and constructive social equilibrium. " The employer, in the words
39 Gignoux, op. cit.
40 Remarks by Mr. Adolph Mueller, Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the NAM, May, 1923.
41 La crisi sociale da Crista a Mussolini, by Gaetano Lisanti (undated); see also the two famous papal encyclicals on the "Social Question," Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo anno (1931), outlined in Chapter II above. The former (as in- dicated above, in Chapter IV) called for "social harmony" and "class collaboration" along lines of integral syndicalism {mixed or collateral); the second formally accepted the (Fascist) "special syndical and corporative organization . . . inaugurated . . . within recent times," becoming thereby not only in effect a collaborator with the Fascist system of Mussolini, but also the inspirer of the ill-fated Clerical Fascism of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg in Austria and the Falangist system of Franco in Spain. Its program was also officially recommended to the United States by sixteen Catholic prelates on Feb. 9, 1940, speaking for the National Catholic Welfare Conference, in the form of a proposal for a "Guild or Corporative System. " The same propaganda in South America (see Harold Callender in the New York Times, (April 28, 1941) is ad- vanced through clerical circles; it is pro-Nazi and anti-American.
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of "Open Shop Committee" of the NAM, "is the natural leader of his workmen. " *- "The real and ideal union is the one between employer and employee" as a recent bulletin of the NAM has an- nounced.
The obverse of this felicitous state is held to arise the instant trade unions appear on the scene. If one traces back through the literature of the Spitzenverbdnde^ one finds the language of invec- tive heaped on trade unions and trade union-leaders so uniformly the same that all of it might well have been issued from a single headquarters. Many of the Spitzenverbdnde have originated out of a desire to organize all employers along class lines,'*^ or have shortly made this one of their principal interests. '^*
The attitude of employers in Germany and Italy under totali- tarian colors is too well known to require elaboration here. There trade unions, strikes, boycotts, and even the more familiar methods of employee retaliation have been formally outlawed. In England, France, and the United States the position is much the same, but no power has yet made such drastic action on behalf of the Spitzen- verbdnde possible. The program of the NAM, known for years by the term Parryism--after its author, David M. Parry (see p. 194, above)--was launched in 1903 and is still held as the official posi- tion; it may be taken as typical of the attitude of all the Spitzenver- bdnde,
According to Parry,
organized labor knows but one law and that is the law of physical force --the law of the Huns and Vandals, the law of the savage. All its pur- poses are accomplished either by actual force or by the threat of force. It does not place its reliance upon reason and justice, but in strikes, boy- cotts and coercion. It is, in all essential features, a mob power knowing
42 "He is the natural leader of his workmen, and is able by instruction, example and fair dealing to bring to bear constantly upon them influences for right-thinking and action and for loyalty to the common enterprise. " Proceedings of the 28th An- nual Meeting of the NAM, May, 1923.
43 As, e. g. , for all those employers' organizations with which labor problems are the primary concern such as the Norwegian Employers' Association, founded in 1900, the Swedish Employers' Federation, organized in 1902, and the Confederation of British Employers' Organizations, organized in 1919. As in Germany, Holland, Japan and a number of other countries, employer organizations were set up as parallel and cooperating bodies along with the industrial Spitzenverbdnde, which included much the same membership.
4* As with the NAM from 1903 to the present, and the Confederation G^nerale du Patronat Fran9ais after reorganization following the Matignon Agreement in 1936.
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no master except its own will. Its history is stained with blood and ruin. It extends its tactics of coercion and intimation over all classes, dictat- ing to the press and to the politicians and strangling independence of thought and American manhood. *^
There is no evil for which organized labor could not be held accountable by Mr. Parry. It "denies to those outside its ranks the individual right to dispose of their labor as it sees fit" (denies "free- dom of labor"), and asserts that each workman is "his own judge of the length of time he shall work" and how much he shall do on the job. It takes no account of the "varying degrees of natural apti- tude and powers of endurance" of different individuals, and places, through restrictions on output, a premium on "indolence and in- competency" and thereby reduces all labor to one "dead level. " Its "leaders are found to be agitators and demagogues, men who ap- peal to prejudice and envy, who are constantly instilling a hatred of wealth and ability, and who, in incendiary speeches, attempt to stir up men to seize by physical force that which their merit can- not obtain for them. " *(R)
This phraseology could be duplicated in the language of anti- labor organizations in every major capitalistic country in the world. The position of the NAM has not changed on the major issue, as the La Follette Committee reports on labor espionage, employer strike-breaking tactics,*^ and so forth, have shown at great length, or as may be read from reports to the National Labor Relations Board on the cases of Little Steel and Remington Rand. *^ Follow- ing the Matignon Agreement in 1936 between the COT, repre- senting the bulk of French Organized labor, and the CGPF, repre- senting organized French business, French employers not only reorganized their central association on a militant basis similar
45 Report of President David M. Parry, Proceedings of the 8th Annual Convention of the NAM, April 14-16, 1903.
46 Ibid.
47 See the various sections of Report 6, Part 6 of the La Follette Committee Reports. 48 In its Labor Relations Bulletin, July 20, 1936, the NAM referred to the "Mo-
hawk Valley Formula," by way of which Remington-Rand broke the strike at its plants as "constructive" and "a real contribution to civic dignity. " The National Labor Relations Board summary of the case found that the Formula called for "employment of strike-breaking agencies . . . use of spies, 'missionaries' and armed guards . . . attempts to turn civil authorities and business and other interests in the various cities against the union . . . intensive publicity and propaganda . . . based upon deliberate falsehoods and exaggerations," and so on.
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throughout to that of the NAM, but also established a special watchtower Committee of Foresight and Social Action (Comite de Pr^voyance et d'Action Sociale), which set as its goal the complete and final overcoming of the much feared trend towards "the dic- tatorship of the proletariat," the "crumbling of authority," *^ the establishment of worker Soviets" in the factories through the "sit- down strike" and the "occupation of factories," ^? which they pro- fessed to see threatening all French industry.
But how achieve the objective? The Committee on Resolutions of the NAM once declared ^^ that "fair dealing" between employer and employee is centered not on the existence of "organizations of labor as such," but is conditioned upon the complete abolition of "boycotts, blacklists and other illegal acts of interference with the personal liberty of employer and employee" (italics mine). To this end it affirmed the complete freedom of the employer to hire and fire at will, and of the employee to work or quit irrespective of
"membership or non-membership in any labor organizations. " Such membership was not to constitute a basis for discrimination, but neither must employers be interfered with in the "management of their business, in determining the amount and quality of their products, and in the use of any methods, or systems of pay which are just and equitable. " Mutually satisfactory wages and working conditions could only be worked out individually between em- ployer and employee, and at no time should the employer be in- timidated by threat of strikes, nor should he be required to resort to the lockout. These principles, the Association announced again in
1907 are matters not of "capital against labor, nor employers against
employees, but . . . of good citizenship against bad citizenship
. . . of Americanism and patriotism against demagogism and so-
^^
49 See, e, g. , Gignoux, op. cit. : M. Duchemin, "Sur I'Accord Matignon," Revue de Paris, Feb. 1, 1937; and various issues of La Journee Industrielle, official publication of the Confederation Gdn^rale du Patronat Francais.
50 Particularly interesting are some of the publications of the Comit^ de Pr^voy- ance et d'Action Sociale, such as the following: Les Dangers economiques et sociaux du controls de I'embauchage; L'exposition a-t-elle eti sabot^e? [by the COT]; and La Riglementation de I'embauchage et du HcenciSment en Allemagne (similar articles for the United States and Italy).
51 Proceedings of the 8th Annual Convention.
^^Proceedings of the 12th Annual Convention, Committee on Resolutions report- ing on "Industrial Peace. "
cialism. "
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The employers' case as stated here remains unaltered to this day. The argument rests on three closely related theses: (1) strikes, boycotts, blacklists, are or ought to be declared illegal; that is, they are blows directed not only against the employer, but also against the laws of the land (the American form of government). These are methods of intimidation which are not and cannot be sanc- tioned by law, and even the lockout employed in retaliation is a defensive weapon which employers should not be forced to utilize in a society governed by the rule of law. (2) Complete freedom of the employer can only be effected by keeping unabridged his right to hire, fire, and control the conditions and terms of employment, and complete freedom of the employee can only be maintained by keeping free access to all jobs and the terms on which employment is taken without the interference at any point by the collective will of his fellows. (3) Collective antiemployer trade-union action ema- nates from insincere labor leadership (demagogues; racketeers) whose objectives are to undermine the institutions of the country (Americanism and patriotism) on behalf of "alien" and "socialis- tic" doctrines.
This position of the National Association of Manufacturers is a precis not only for their own subsequent history, but also for the social policies of all the other Spitzenverbdnde. The language has changed from time to time and from country to country, but upon this doctrinal tripod rests the whole superstructure of antilabor policies of employer organizations throughout the world. By the same token, the social programs of the Spitzenverbdnde, both within and without totalitarian countries, are directed along three main lines: (1) render militant labor action impossible or at least severely actionable by law; (2) control the conditions and terms of the wage contract; and (3) "re-educate" and reorient the social ideology of the previously "misled" labor masses.
Space is not available for detailed review of the history of these efforts. It is noteworthy, however, that the first action taken within the Fascist and Nazi systems was the complete abolition of all trade unions. The Konoye-Matsuoka regime in Japan had by the end of
1940 practically completed a similar task. The Petain government in France moved to destroy all trade unions, and particularly the militant CGT, as the first step in its program of "collaboration"
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with the triumphant Nazis. Along with abolition of trade unions, strikes, lockouts, boycotts, blacklists and all similar tools of social warfare have been declared illegal in that rump state. Much the same effect was for a period of time achieved in England as a result of the Trades Disputes Act and other legislation following the great coal strike in 1926. It seems probable on the evidence of emphatic and oft-repeated declarations by accredited spokesmen, that if either the labor-relations alter ego of the Federation of British In- dustries--the Confederation of Employers' Organizations--or the National Association of Manufacturers were given a carte blanche to write onto the statute books what they felt to be the most de- sirable legislation, the law in both England and the United States would promptly come clearly into line with the antilabor prohibi- tive ordinances of the Axis states.
Further proof than is provided by the many express statements of the two latter associations (in condemnation of the weapons of militant labor action) that such action would ensue is provided by comparison of the internal programs of the alternative or sub- stitute types of labor organization devised by capitalistic interests within and without totalitarian circles. Salvemini has referred to the Fascist "Workers Confederations" as a system of nation-wide "Company Unions. " ^^ The same may be said of the Nazi "Labor Front" (Arbeitsfront). ^^ Yet, as pointed out above, the former is entirely in line with the preexisting Catholic program of "integral syndicalism" first clearly formulated by church spokesmen in the
1 850s ^^ and popular with the great corporate interests of the Po industrial complex on the eve of the Fascist coup d'etat, while the latter is a readaptation of the underlying ideas which dominated the establishment of the "Works Committee of the Industrial Em- ployers and Employees of Germany" (Arbeitsausschuss der gewerb- lichen Arbeitgeber und Arbeitnehmer Deutschlands); the last- named group was formed during the revolutionary interlude fol-
53 Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism; see, particularly. Chapter VII, "Company Unions, Nazi Unions, and Fascist Unions. "
54 See Brady, The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism, Chapter IV, "Labor Must Follow Where Capital Leads. "
55 See Gide and Rist, History of Economic Doctrines, particularly the section en- titled, "Doctrines That Owe Their Inspiration to Christianity," pp. 483-517; the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, and Moon, The Labor Problem.
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lowing the war, on the initiative of the Federation of German Employers' Associations (Vereinigung der deutschen Arbeitgeber- verbande), alter ego of the Federation of German Industries (Reichs- verband der deutschen Industrie). (R)*
Now an examination of either of these predecessor bodies, or of those which followed with the triumph of corporate principles, will show that they all had in common plans for a systematic application throughout their entire economic systems of what has long been known in the United States as "company unionism. " Neither, that is to say, the specific programs, nor the idea of expanding and fed- erating nation-wide networks of such employer-controlled labor associations is confined to countries now in the Axis block. Some- thing of the nature of Italian collateral syndicalism seems to have been envisaged by the Federation of British Industries with its "National Alliance of Employers and Employed" set up in 1920. (R)^ Since the triumph of the Tories in 1926 this rather mild attempt to adapt to peacetime conditions the principles of a but partially employer-controlled wartime Whitleyism has been kept from crys- tallizing along Labor Front lines. The primary reason for this has been internal factionalism amongst the "Confederation of Embit- tered Obstructionists"--as a friendly critic refers to the Confed- eration of Employers' Organizations--and not to any significant differences of opinion as to the desirable objectives.
The first pioneering effort to set up a nation-wide federation of company unions--equivalent to the Labor Front--was, in fact, American. In 1912, an expatriate union leader named Joseph W. Bryce presented a plan before the Annual Convention of the NAM which called for a nation-wide organization to be known as the Trades and Workers Association; this was to be made up jointly of employers and employees, organized along occupational lines in city and regional confederations, which were in turn federated into
the central association. Employers were to assume the position
56 In turn a member of the Zentralverband der deutschen Arbeitgeberverbande.
57 In the formative days of the Federation of British Industries it had been hoped by some that the Federation itself might include "not merely the representatives of capital but those of labour . . . something approaching a partnership between capital and labour in place of the armed neutrality, which is the best that can be hoped for under present circumstances. " The Whitley councils were regarded as a temporary method of coping with mounting wartime dissatisfaction of British labor over rising costs of living in face of war profiteering.
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throughout of leaders to the employee ranks. ^^ Employers and em- ployees, when joining the organization were both to sign a like obligation, "on the word of honor of a man" to promote "industrial peace . . . by organizing branch associations all over this land which shall teach, preach and practice this doctrine, not by erecting an army of strike breakers, but by creating an association of men and women who shall gain fair treatment by giving fair treatment and will not strike. " ^(R)
Bryce was warmly applauded, but interest was lukewarm. By that time the danger of unionism seemed to the members of the NAM not so imminent as it had in 1903. But this attitude of com- placency was rudely shaken a year later with the bombshell of "Bloody Ludlow. " Thereafter the Rockefeller type of "Company Union" ^^ gained great popularity. During the twenties this com- pany unionism became the Siamese twin to the NAM's Open Shop or "American Plan. " With the coming of the great depression, the program was widened out, the better to cope first with the rising labor unrest which accompanied mounting unemployment, and then successively with the pro-labor "Article 7a" of the NRA and the National Labor Relations Board. The rise of the CIO brought this phase of the antiunion drive to a rather disastrous close.
68 Proceedings of the 17th Annual Convention of the NAM, 1912.
59 The plan was "to establish branches of our Association in the various cities. Those branches may be what we term mixed branches of the various trades, or where there are sufficient numbers of any one trade they may form a branch of their own, such as a carpenters' branch, a bricklayers' branch, etc. " When this had been done in each locality where the NAM had members, "Our next move is to establish a labor bureau" to find employment for members by making special "arrangements with the various industries to supply them with efficient men, organized upon the peace principles. " These arrangements provided for preferential employment of Trades and Workers Association members. Then, "when we obtain work for our members, we say to them, 'Now it is up to you to make good. If you are an efficient loyal employee, good wages, good working conditions and steady employment will be furnished you in so far as it is possible. ' " This, said Mr. Bryce, should insure to employers "interested and peaceful employees . . . who want to remain at work without interference from agitators and bulldozers" with their "rights by continuing at work. " Ibid.
60 There are two basic American types, the "committee" type, which stems from the more benevolent "welfare capitalism" schemes and traces its origin to the Filene Cooperative Association established in 1898.