No More Learning

1. Atrendtowardprotectionagainstforeigncompetitionreaches back to the Bismarck tariff of 1879. Definitely protectionist and "autarchic" in all countries, its basis of autarchy is not the nation, but the maximum area of empire or sphere of influence. Protective tariffs are to autarchic programs as youth is to age; autarchy might be regarded as generalized and rationalized protection, and the basis is imperial, or continental (Grossraumwirtschaft) self-suffi- cient systems. All nations now have systems of "imperial prefer-
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? ECONOMIC POLICIES
ence," of which the British scheme worked out at Ottawa is only the better known and more spectacular. The long-run changes over time are the following: (a) tariff walls have been heightened and generalized to meet the needs of every organized interest grouping; (b) the forms of protection and aid have been multiplied to meet every peculiar need; (c) the whole of the network of na- tional protection and aid has gradually been articulated into a more or less rationalized system of economic-political aggrandize- ment; (d) administration has been placed in the hands of admin- istrative bodies given wide latitude in the use of the tools for the advance of national economic interests both at home and abroad Machtpolitik; (R)^ (e) these administrative bodies may be publicly owned, privately owned (as with British industrial reorganization schemes for coal, shipping, retail trade and textiles), or "mixed" (as in the case of the Hermann Goringwerke, the British Cen- tral Electricity Board, the leading Japanese "development com- panies" in Manchuria, North China and the South Seas). But in any case, they tend to become all-inclusive monopolies in a sense analogous to the early mercantilistic trading companies.
2. The second element is protection against competition at home. Appearing under the common euphemism, "fair trade practice," laws cumulatively circumscribing and hedging competition about with a multitude of controls and administrative rules are now to be found in every major capitalistic country. Promoted by business pressure-groups, and growing in number and range of importance with amazing speed, these laws all tend to promote--^after the models of the exclusive monopoly and cartel--some degree of price fixation, systems of discount, brokerage fee allowances, circum- scription of marketing areas, conditions and terms of delivery and sale, and the like. The Programs of the Robinson-Patman Act, the
Miller-Tydings Bill, the Agricultural Marketing Act, the Capper- Volstead Act, the 45 or more state price-maintenance laws, and a vast supporting, corollary, supplementary, and elaborating out- pouring of federal, state and local legislation and administrative
67 This interest--protection from foreign competition--was the major force behind the organization of the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the predecessor bodies of the Reichsverband der deutschen Industrie, the Confederation G^n^rale de la Production Fran^aise (predecessor body to the Confederation Generate du Patronat Fran^ais, and the Federation of British Industries.
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ECONOMIC POLICIES
rulings can be duplicated now in every country of the world. (R)^ The differences here between policies advocated by the Spitzenver- hdnde and their supplementary pressure groups in the United States on the one hand, and in the totalitarian countries on the other is one of degree, not of kind or method. ^(R) The Nazis, for ex- ample, understood NRA at its inception to be in keeping with the corporate ideas of "stabilized business" advocated by the Nazi state/*^ War has a tendency to accelerate the pace, not to alter the lines of growth/^
68 It should be noticed, however, that the growth of internal trade barriers is not necessarily in harmony with these other trends--may, in fact, break down efforts to block out different types of special trade or interest controls. Cf. , the equivocal posi- tion of the Automobile Manufacturers' Association to state resale price-maintenance, antidiscrimination, antitrust, below-cost and motor-vehicle dealer licensing laws (outlined in a series of charts, 1937).
69 "Under the guise of establishing standards of 'fair trade practice,' competition was sublimated to the extent of virtual extinction. In many industries it forthwith became 'unfair* to utilize existing productive capacity even to the extent that actual orders for goods indicated to be profitable from the standpoint of particular manage- ment and warrantable from the standpoint of the social economy. 'Spread out the business! ' It became 'unfair' to underbid other producers--witness the numerous code provisions requiring the maintenance of fixed margins and the recovery of standard- ized, indeed arbitrary, 'average costs. ' " Myron Watkins, "The Economic Implications of Unfair Competition," Iowa Law Review, Jan. , 1936, p. 269. Since the demise of NRA all these practices have become more or less common throughout American economic life. For Germany, see especially Heinz Mullensiefen, Das neue Kartell-, Zwangskartell- und Preisuberwachungsrecht (1934), and Freiheit und Bindung in der geordneten Wirtschaft (1939). For Italy, any issue of the voluminous and complete, Sindicate e Corporazione, and Helmut VoUweiler, Der Staats- und Wirtschaftsaufbau im Faschistischen Italien (Wurzburg-Aumiihle, 1939). For England, Lucas, Industrial Reconstruction; Levy, Monopolies, Cartels, and Trusts, current issues of the London Economist, and various plans for industrial reorganization of PEP (Political and Economic Planning). For the United States, Burns, The Decline of Competition; Ewald T. Grether, Price Control under Fair Trade Legislation (New York, 1939).
70 They based this judgment, as the author can testify from numerous personal in- terviews with leading German businessmen during 1935, upon such as the following: "The 'Key' factor in the NRA program is America's 3,500 larger (State and National) trade associations--and the over 10,000 local Trade Associations, Chambers of Com- merce, etc. The whole fabric of business organizations is inter-twined and ready to cooperate with the some 500 industries now under approved Codes and with the National Recovery Administration in all sound 'Business-Government Partnership' plans. " Statement of the American Trade Association Executives, prepared by the Trade Association Section of the Marketing Research and Service Division of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, U. S. Dept. of Commerce, and issued as "High Lights of the NRA, Chart No. 3," July 10, 1934.
71 Practically all the important British food industries, for example, now brought into control boards under Britain's "feudalistic system of cartel control," have behind them "marketing" agreements quite similar to those worked out by the AAA in the United States, and which now govern, under one authority or another, almost the entirety of the highly specialized fruit and vegetable crops of California. A reading
? ECONOMIC POLICIES
3. The third, protection against dissolution and from becoming extra-marginal, takes many different forms--the limitation of ca- pacity, capacity factors, incoming concerns, and provision of public funds for "bailing out" otherwise bankrupt firms. ^^ The fringes of high-cost concerns are lopped-off and at the same time innovations are controlled. In an "emergency," government regulates, "pro- tects," and supplies generous aid. What was once defined as an "emergency" then tends to become a permanent condition, rein- forced, maintained and "stabilized" as a part of business-as-usual (relief disbursements, programs of public works, military expendi- tures, credit controls, government credit, price regulation). In general the effect is that prices are lowered or costs are adjusted so that the least efficient concern is brought into the organized system of protection. ^^ In the patois, average revenues of the firm closest to the margin are "pegged" above average costs. "^* But costs are construed not as sums which add but as categories whose dimen- sions are a function of policies centered in and controlled through the new systems of protection.
4. The fourth element is protection against the business cycle and analogous hazards. The attitude of business is slowly chang- ing from hostility toward programs of armaments (wartime) and
of the "Statutory Rules and Orders" for the potato-marketing agreement, or for pigs, bacon, milk, etc. , based upon the British Agricultural Marketing Act of 1931, will show that the English intended that these boards should be possessed of powers which might readily be expanded to control the several food industries lock, stock and barrel, and with reference to all problems of production and distribution, and for all persons or parties involved therein. In many respects they are scarcely to be distinguished from the Nazi Marktordnungsgrundsdtze for German agriculture.
72 See, in particular, the summary of Code provisions given in The National Re- covery Administration, by Leverett Lyon and others (Washington, D. C. , 1935), which details at great length Code devices for achieving "protection" against all the usual hazards of competitive business. For the period since the demise of NRA, perhaps the best source of information is the various reports of the Institute of Distribution.
73 It was accepted as a ruling principle in the regulated economies of both World Wars that profits should be guaranteed every enterprise participating in war pro- duction. Since all enterprises are thus subject to--and actually have become involved in--war control, this system of compulsory profits has come out to mean as many or almost as many price schedules as there are cost schedules. The NRA codes and the corporate systems of Italy and Germany have applied these wartime principles to many of the processes of peace. But they are applied neither in the totalitarian nor in the "liberal-capitalistic" countries to the tolerated, profitless, outsider fringe. The fringe, however, is not extra-marginal; it is outside the pale of granted privilege.
74 With the tendency, as shown in the NRA Codes, for example, to include a "normal return on investment" over and above interest payments, not as revenue but as cost! See Watkins, "The Economic Implications of Unfair Competition,"
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? 256 ECONOMIC POLICIES
public-works (peacetime) in times of depression, to one of accept- ance and--particularly so far as armaments are concerned--en- thusiastic support/^ Surpluses of manpower (unemployment), of goods (met by the equivalent of "valorization," market surplus, "ever-normal granary" methods) and of capacity are becoming nat- ural, normal, chronic features of highly developed capitalist civi- lization. It is only a question of time until methods applied par- tially or sporadically in the field of agriculture will be generalized over the entire economic system. All the Spitzenverbdnde seem to agree that these methods can only be administered by central pub- lic authority, by the aid of war, public works and other supporting programs, and under the administration of businessmen who will see to it that the results of such policies, intended to "help busi- ness," are not such as to hurt business as a result of "mistaken idealism," "reformism," or "socialistic" ideas. And all such policies call for protection against the demands of competing interests (that is, little-business and nonbusiness interests). ^*
Centralized Control. --^Without exception--in England, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and the United States, Belgium, Holland, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Sweden, and in all other countries still existing or now submerged, which have central, national Spitzen- verbdnde--all inclusive plans and programs for industry, trade, and interindustry organization are referred to as "self-government in business. " ^^ So far as one may generalize from past trends and present incomplete records of experimentation,^^ the concept of "self-government in business" means something like this: in a fashion somewhat similar to, and possibly patterned in some re-
75 The monthly letters of the National City Bank during 1938 and 1939, make ex- tremely interesting reading in this connection. Government spending for relief, public works, etc. , was regarded as the balance wheel of the economic system, and the arguments employed by the National City Bank are almost identical with those running through German business periodicals and expressed directly to the author by leading German businessmen who dwelt most enthusiastically on the public-work and armaments programs of the Third Reich.
76 These will be dealt with in the following chapter.
77 The German expression alone means "self-management" (Selbstverwaltung). But this is in keeping with German tradition, which always admits at every stage of the game, tighter, more inclusive, and more rigid central control.
78 See, in this connection, the various efforts by NRA to evolve "master plans," "blanket codes," and "blue eagle" dicta; see also the various German and Italian laws (of which the current French "corporate" pattern appears to be a blend) relating to cartels, price control and price supervision.
ECONOMIC POLICIES
257
spects directly after, the systems of managerial decentralization by regions and functions evolved by concerns such as General Motors, the A. T. and T. , Imperial Chemicals, I. G. Farben, and Vereinigte Stahlwerke, trade associations wish to administer or "govern" each and every industry as semi- or wholly autonomous groups within a framework of control laid down by the central authorities. It is a concept not unlike that of corporate guild economy in the medie- val period, except that here leadership is taken by a cooptative elite dominated by the huge corporate combines and communities of interest. ^^ The authority carries with it legal or quasi-legal power to enforce compliance upon the totality of the industry and, fur- thermore, compliance practices are governed by codified rules of the general order of codes of "fair-trade practices," (R)^ which assume a set of directives of an ultimately social and political character. This is the capitalistic equivalent to agrarian states' rights doc- trines as viewed by a champion of planter aristocracy such as John Calhoun.
Compliance by the entire industry with the dicta of the coopted "self-governing" cliques involves a rationalization and systematiza- tion of cartel-like pattern of control for all industry. So far as the economic side is concerned this means that business feels that provisions must be made to (1) prevent "cutthroat competition" within the industry,^^ (2) keep "monopolistic competition" within industries whose products may be partially or wholly substitutable for each other from taking on a similar cutthroat character ^^-- sort of domestication of competition within the central control net- work which shifts a problem of economic warfare into one of in- trigue, cabal, and junta--and (3) require of each industry (as of each member concern within each industry) rigid adherence to the decisions of the central authorities, so far as these decisions touch
79 See the following chapter for an elaboration of the "cooperative" principle.
80 The Group Industrie of the Reichswirtschaftskammer has made an attempt to codify "fair-trade practices" for all German industry. Something of the sort has been attempted by most national and regional chambers of commerce, and by most Spitzen- verbdnde in every major industrial country.
81 "Cutthroat competition" is, of course, the obverse of "fair-trade practices. " "Fair- trade practices" equal, in the main, cartel controls; in practice "cutthroat competi- tion" comes to mean loss to those who, unlike Eugene O'Neill's "Hairy Ape," belong.
82 As when Alcoa attempts to control magnesium (a competitive light metal), or rayon, silk; or butter, margerine; etc.
a
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upon issues which bind them all together into a coherent system of national business administration.
This latter requirement, centering as it does on the issues and the structures of domination, necessarily reaches far beyond the economic issues of a system of self-regulated capitalism. Far more than "free competition" and laissez faire go out the window with the shift from "monopoly competition" to "self-regulated monop- oly. " With this shift goes a gradual taking over of the offices and prerogatives of government. If the Spitzenverbdnde continue to travel along the same paths, government by the business system will find their members pulling together on social and political issues, however restive they may become under controls which they im- pose upon themselves ^^ by their own developing monopoly prac- tices of "self-regimentation. "
83 "We are faced," Mr. Arnold holds, "with a choice of either enforcing the anti- trust laws or drifting in the direction of the self-regimentation of business. " Again, "Since the war a weak government permitted the whole German production and distributing system to be organized from top to bottom by trade associations and cartels. Sporadic attempts prior to 1930 to allow new and independent enterprise a chance were stifled. Industrial Germany became so self-regimented that there was a place for everyone and everyone had to keep his place. The cartel system led only to higher prices. Here was regimentation without leadership and arbitrary power without control. Germany became organized to such an extent that a Fuehrer was inevitable; had it not been Hitler it would have been someone else. " Speech before the Cleveland Bar Association, March 7, 1939 (Dept. of Justice News Release). The implication that the advance of monopoly controls leads to Fascist-type systems cor- responds entirely with the facts. See also Bruck, Social and Economic History of Germany, and the various articles of the London Economist cited above. But there is likewise a dangerous over-simplification in so stating the matter, as will be pointed out in the following chapter.
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? Chapter VIII
SOCIAL POLICIES: STATUS, TRUSTEESHIP, HARMONY
AS MONOPOLY STANDS at the ccntcr of the new economics, so status l\ is the heart of its appropriate social outlook. The two are com- plementary products of that modernized system of "granted privi-
lege," "special concession," "neo-mercantilism," "generalized pro- tection," and "feudalistic capitalism" ^ being brought about by the growing centralization of policy-forming power which is so com- mon a feature of all major capitalistic economies. What private monopoly is to the economic side, the structure and ideology of status is to the social. Given the one, the other follows.
A perhaps somewhat more acceptable and comforting, though obviously less straightforward, way of expressing the same notion would be to speak of the apotheosis of trusteeship (stewardship). Certainly this term, the precise equivalent of authoritative leader- ship, enjoys a steadily widening popularity as a mode of justifying both the growing concentration of power within the several forms of pyramidal authority, and the specific use of this power as it is brought to bear upon the interests of different classes of the popu- lation. It appears commonly in a context devoted to such com- panion ideas as "self-government in business," "service in busi-
1 See Werner Sombart's discussion of guild and mercantilistic systems of Privilegie- rung in his Moderne Kapitalismus (Leipzig, 1924), I, Part I, 375 ff. , and Part II, 614-15, for purposes of contrast with points made in articles appearing in the London Economist, "The Economic Front," Dec. 9, 1939, and "The Cartelisation of England," March 18, 1939.
2 "Stewardship" is the terra preferred by "Tie-Wig" exponents of New England Calvinist theocracy as championed by Fisher Ames and Robert Treat Paine in the
Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, 1939), II, 275-95. But the underlying ideological content of Brahmin Whiggery and big business public relations is cut of much the same doctrinal cloth.
early nineteenth century; cf. ,
J.
? 26o SOCIAL POLICIES
ness," and "profits through service. " ^ It has become a favorite expression amongst the more successful public-relations coun- selors not only in the United States, but also abroad. The Japanese Zaibatsu think of themselves as trustees much as did the younger Rockefeller who, in his "Industrial Creed," stated the case for "Welfare Capitalism" so convincingly that he was able to set the new tone for American business. * In Nazi Germany it has become the custom to refer to the businessman as "trustee of the com- munity's welfare. "
There are those who fear that one or more public interests may be imperiled by the great powers thus "entrusted" to business "leaders," and yet wish not to be severely critical of what appears to them here to stay so long as the capitalistic system survives; they therefore lean heavily on the staff of the "trustee relation. " A spirit of mutual regard, hold the authors of a remarkable little govern- ment document of recent vintage, will do much to render happy and profitable this relation between the "trustee" and those de- pendent upon the quality of the passions governing his behavior: "A widespread, favorable attitude of mind is a first essential to effective trusteeship in big business. People must expect and as- sume that managers will look out for interests other than their own. Managers in turn will then attempt to live up to expectations. " ^
It will do no great harm to the better understanding of the hard realities which stand behind this engaging language to point out that the concept of trusteeship has always suffused the thinking of all proponents of and apologists for those systems of evolving status which have been compelled, for one reason or another, to take
3 "The objectives of industrial organization have . . . been defined as profit through service, profit in this sense meaning the compensatory material gain or re- ward obtained through service. " Mooney and Reiley, Onward Industry! , p. 342. A similar expression of this idea appears in TNEC Monograph No. 7, Measurement of the Social Performance of Business, p. 1 : "Business is not merely nor even in the first instance a struggle of individuals for wealth. It is a way of life, a system of providing goods and services. It is not a segment of the community, cooperating or warring with other segments, such as labor, consumers, or farmers. It is not superior nor inferior to the community. It is the community engaged in getting its daily bread. Its goals, its ethics, its welfare are inseparable from the goals and aspirations and welfare of the community. No matter how much or how often the business phases of social or community activity may be abstracted, analyzed, and separately discussed the funda- mental and organic unity between business and the community is indissoluble. "
4 The Personal Relation in Industry.
8 TNEC, Monograph No. 11, Bureaucracy and Trusteeship in Large Corporations, p. 130.
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steps to create a favorable public opinion. The differences here be- tween the language of a patriarchal imperialist such as the divine Augustus of early imperial Rome or of the Benevolent Despots of eighteenth-century Europe on the one hand, and that of an Ivy Lee or a Robert Ley on the other, is one not of content, nor even of felicity of phrase and refinement of expression, but of the times and the fields of application.
That greatest of all Benevolent Despots, Frederick the Great, played the role of thoughtful but stern paterfamilias to his people in much the same spirit as the Emperor of contemporary Japan, moved by the silken etiquette of Bushido, does to his. Thomas Aquinas, the great Church logician, spoke for the "trustee" rela- tion of superior to inferior in the tight hierarchy of graduated medieval infeudation. Robert Ley, Leader of the Nazi Labor Front, employs a similar language on behalf of his colleague Darr^'s "New Nobility of Blood and Soil," wrought out of Prussian Junkers, industrial baronry, and military warlords. And a leading Ameri- can industrialist, James D. Mooney, with no less gravity, reiterates a like argument in defense of the "leader-led" hierarchies of com- mand and subordination which govern the vast sprawling economic
empires of American private enterprise.
The ideology of trusteeship, as Max Weber has shown at length
in his great sociological study,(R) is and always has been a character- istic feature of all patriarchal, patrimonial, and "charismatic" forms of despotic authority. The "master set," which wishes to "lead" as though through a "calling," has always looked upon itself as "steward" or "trustee" to the people which it governs. Of such is the age-old language of ruling class paternalism. But, of course, fine benevolence of phrase or action caters no less to a system of status for that. On the contrary both historically and sociologically, such conceptions are unthinkable in the absence of it.
Returning then to our original characterization, what social policies advocated by and through the Spitzenverbdnde are so suf- ficiently common and uniform throughout the vast and highly centralized business machinery of every major capitalistic country
6 Grundriss der Sozialokonomik, Part III; in particular Chapters III ("Die Typen der Herrschaft"), VII ("Patrimonialismus"), VIII ("Wirkung des Patriarchalismus und des Feudalismus"), and XI ("Staat und Hierokratie"). See also Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1899), and Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times (New York, 1923).
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that they may be regarded as an integral part of the new business outlook?
ATTITUDE OF MANAGERIAL AND DIRECTORIAL "^ RANKS TOWARDS THEMSELVES
The Hammonds, in their penetrating studies /of early English factory conditions,^ found that the typical capitalist of the age of the Combination Acts thought of himself ". . . as the great bene- factor . . . who incidentally receives income in the form of prof- its. " ^ And so likewise in our times. "The purpose of business," one of our definitely more democratically minded businessmen, Mr. Filene, once wrote, "is to produce and to distribute to all humanity the things which humanity, with its new-found power, can now be organized to make only if it can be organized to buy and use them. " But in the words of what Virgil Jordan, President of the National Industrial Conference Board, once referred to as the professional "Troubadours of Trade," the doctrine is subtly transformed. The businessman now "leads," not because he is selfish and greedy, but because his unusual abilities burden him with the care for the fortunes of less gifted mankind, argues Mr. Link, successful coun- selor to the great in American business circles.
The employer who assumes the responsibility of giving work to other people, of providing the necessary weekly payroll, of entrusting larger responsibilities to his subordinates as the business grows, of meeting the risks of competition, labor problems, manufacturing difficulties, and the thousand and one griefs that go with almost every business, mani- fests daily a high order of unselfishness. Through his energy and leader- ship, he improves the lot of his employees far beyond the point which their personal efforts would have made possible. The fact that he may benefit, materially, more than any other one individual, is inevitable in the situation and not an indictment of his character. ^^
This statement can be taken as fully representative of the run of the more astute and farsighted, reactionary, employer opinion throughout all the business literature of the Spitzenverbdnde. But
7 The "directorial" ranks may not, in fact, have much real power. See the TNEC Monograph, No. ii.
8 The Town Labourer.
9 "Confessions of an Economist," New Republic, Dec. 29, 1926.
10 The Return to Religion (The Macmillan Company, New York, 1936).
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more, that benevolently postured attitude is carried by such em- ployers not only into labor, but also into all social relations be- tween themselves and the general public.
A leading spokesman for American public-relations counselors has deftly used the career of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , as a basis for a sermon in eulogy of the paternal outlook: " "He (Mr. Rockefeller) has given complete expression to Mr. Vail's dictum that 'the rights of private property are not, and cannot be, superior to public welfare. ' Conscientiously he has developed and maintained the principle of stewardship and of what amounts to a virtual accounting to the public in the ad- ministration of a fortune--viewed not so much as personal wealth but as a public trust. " In another passage Mr. Batchelor refers to "diversification of industrial ownership" as a factor compelling businessmen to "thoroughly subordinate their personal interests security trading, for example--in a new sense of genuine trustee- ship. "
Speaking on behalf of the industrial giants in the German busi- ness community at a Niirnberg conference, Dr. Schacht ^^ held that "the time is past when the notion of economic self-seeking and unrestricted use of profits made can be allowed to dominate. To be sure, no individual enterprise, no less the national economy, can exist without making a surplus, but the gains must once again be applied in the sense of and in service to the total community. " In a remarkably militant book, penned on the eve of the second World War, the new leader of the Confederation Gen^rale du Patronat Fran^ais, M. Gignoux, stated the position of French militant em- ployers vis-a-vis the Popular Front in almost precisely the same terms. ^^ Other quotations by the hundred might be cited from British, Italian and similar sources.
The natural role of the self-appointed trustee is universally held to be, throughout this same literature, that of community "leader. " In Germany and Italy he is officially assigned this honored position in all economic affairs. In the American literature attempts are being made to have the term gradually supplant that of "employer" in the latter's relationships with labor, of "big business" or "trust"
11 Bronson Batchelor, Profitable Public Relations (New York, 1938), pp. 40, 76.
12 Cited by A. 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).
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? 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").
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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":
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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.