Some considerations relative to our times

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Part of The American Chamber of Commerce Journal

Title: Some considerations relative to our times
Language: English
Source: The American Chamber of Commerce Journal Volume XIII (No. 10) October 1933
Year: 1933
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Fulltext: 4 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL October, 1933 Some Considerations Relative to Our Times If the old gray mare of individualism is no longer up to scratch, what crit ter is to replace her? Quo vadimos? In viewing the United States under the influence of the sweeping reform legislation of the Roosevelt administration it is essential to bear in mind that Roosevelt’s advent into the White House ended one regime and began another, that the old regime of laissez faire and individualism can never be resuscitated and will never again muster the good opinion, or support, of the American people. Roosevelt’s nomination at Chicago was a public demand, it killed the old regime ;n his own party. His subsequent election was equally a public demand, and it killed the old regime in the opposing party. At nomination and at election he was committed to nothing, save, in the most general terms, to radical reform. He was not bound by patronage. In the legislation that ensued upon his assumption of office, party and partisan government of the United States ended. This paper will try to show how and why this is so. Note that patronage plays no sig nificant part in the new deal, on patron age old-line politics wholly subsisted. Note that the president’s cabinet (a body, by the way, not contemplated in the constitution) is practically non partisan and embraces but one oldline party man, Postmaster General James Farley, who sits below the salt and whose function has evolved into telling old-line politicians what they may not have, not what they may have; who takes, instead of giving, orders from his colleagues, who distinctly are running and manning their own de partments. Note finally, that keymen throughout the administration are coming, not from the ranks of politics, but from the universities. Learning, not mere cunning, is at the president’s disposition. In the Philippines, happily, we have an illustration of what this signifies. Our governor general is distinctly the new type of man that is being called into public service. Shibboleths mean nothing to these men, the intelligent and upright handling of all questions means everything; and not seeking office, they lend their services to the public, which are demanded elsewhere. For precedents to such a situation in American politics it is necessary to turn back a hundred years; to the time prior to the first election of Andrew Jackson president, and to 1848, when a presidential candidate, General Cass of Michigan, for the Democrats, at Baltimore, was nominated by a formal convention of party delegates, for the first time; and President James K. Polk, though of the same party, wrote a deprecating account of it into his diary, pre dicting therein the debasement of politics which it most certainly brought about. In the Roosevelt administration is exemplified such an administration as that, say, of James Monroe, who had John Quincy Adams as his secretary of state. The hold that machine politics has had on the country, with its crooked ways and artificial issues, is broken and will remain so. It is essential to see this fact clearly, for what it imports and for the comment that follows. Having ruined every department of government with patronage, debauched and pauperized the cities, made taxes confiscatory, state administration most ly disgraceful, and the presidency an agency of self-seeking From The Literary Digest ‘'Regardless of the temporary nature of the legislation, it would be difficult, in The Statist’s (leading London financial weekly) opinion, to avoid writing the new rules of industry into permanent statutes.” “While the Industrial Recovery Act is limited to two years, its framers believe there will never be a return to the old order......... ‘Individualism in America will come to an end if legislation of this type and charactei* is placed upon our statute books and kent there.’ (Senator James W. Wadswortn).” “The end of the laissez-faire doctrine of uncontrolled industrial and commercial competition is at hand.” All the quotations above are from the Digest's leader of September 2, by Arthur Crawford, its Washington correspondent. They were picked up after the journal’s paper was written. machinations, machine politics had nothing to do but to abdicate in favor of decency. It is a tribute to the American people that the politicians were let escape without broken necks—that the revolution was lawful and peaceful. Now let us proceed. The arch and keystone of the reforms is the industrial recovery act. The aim of all the legislation is planned in dustry and managed production and credit, so even all banks come under federal license and farming comes under control. The industrial codes are charters. They affect all industries, under them only may any industry function. Members under the codes may be expelled for cause, and a code may be withheld from an industry if it is drawn up in terms inimicable to the public welfare. In the law itself, labor is assured the right of collective bargaining. In the drafting and adoption of codes, labor and capital are both heard and both vote, with the government the final arbiter. The president exercises this vast power independently of congress; the new laws carefully stipulate they are enacted be cause an emergency exists, and so they are immune from nullification by the supreme court. Granting, as they do, labor’s right of collective bargaining, they antiquate a curious grist of juris prudence that has been based upon Thadeus Stevens’s 14th constitutional amendment. This jurisprudence may now be sent to the basement and catalogued for the use of antiquarians, for of the social progress of the country it is out of the way. The laborer’s right to sell his labor for what it would bring, a strained application of the theory that a man is not to be deprived of his property without due process of law, how quaint this was—in practice putting honest wage-payers at the mercy of crooks, of the racketeers in industry, and provok ing child labor and sweat-shops, 12-hour days and the horrify ing 24-hour shift in the steel industry of just the other day. Industry itself must applaud, as happily it seems to do, the demise of such willful inventions of the courts. Only vestigial remains of them persist in the new codes, and these will soon disappear. Now the codes, being really charters, have the effect of erecting the industries of the United States into guilds, like the guilds of the middle ages. Though the guilds of the middle ages were chartered in smaller communities, usually only in cities or in city states, the facilities of modern communication destroy this apparent contrast. Guilds we have. Such being the fact, it is perhaps well to reflect on what the oldtimc guilds were and why they went out of use. They were trade organizations of the arts and crafts that advanced these activities farther in excellency than they have ever, on the whole, been advanced since. To this general rule there are some exceptions, printing being a notable one. The guilds had fast rules, controlled their membership, and in politics voted for their own interests. They never attracted to them more men than could find employment in them, they never produced more than their markets consumed. They served their communities, did not constrain their communities to serve them. October, 1933 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL 5 They guided politics toward democracy, made Italy the birthplace of parliaments, brought public matters to settlement before conferences of representative men. Their decline was not decadence within themselves. It was brought about by the discovery and settlement of the Americas and the conquest of the Far East that inaugurated the era of foreign trade. A return of society to the guilds—it has been done in Italy already, and is taking place in England too, while it will possibly be the final outcome in Russia—is merely a return to natural growth after a long chaotic period of ungoverned • and belligerent strife affected by transitory factors, such as abundance of free virgin land, that in our own time have been, or are at least rapidly being, eliminated from the problem of gregarious life and how best to live it. To cite other factors than land, many have noted with the philosopher Spengler how little stable can be a foreign com merce in the product of machines, when the machines them selves are exported and hinterlanders quickly learn their use; and how vain the exploitation of democratic rights, since constitutions themselves get carried hither and yon in ships and dependent peoples tend to learn, interpret and adopt, them—setting up against your right to trade their own, and their laws against your own. While a man incorrigibly addicted to belief in a policy of laissez faire, or faith in gods of things as they are, may not at once sense it, in truth the world has filled up and learning and knowledge are well dispersed—the trend must be to intranationalism again, the return of industry to administration by guilds is logical and no doubt beneficent. But the adjustments that will come about in all this are interesting, the political adjustments particularly. Industry functioning under national charters, the industrial codes, men working to gether in guilds, soon all employed men will be guild-conscious and think and act for their welfare in contradistinction to the way spellbinding partisans try to teach them’ to think and act. In Iowa, then, men will vote corn and hogs; they will neglect the Republicans and high tariff unless a high tariff really suits them. In Pennsylvania they will vote coal, iron and steel; in Texas and Oklahoma, cotton, corn and cattle, not necessarily Democratic and what have you. Old-line politicians have no place in such politics. This is plainly evident in the conferences that made the codes. Not an old-line politician was in these conferences, but more university men, thinking liberally, nobodies and even contemned in public affairs heretofore, made such pleas to them as must have tempted the shades of the Founders to start from their frames—as if another convention “to form a more perfect union” were deliberating in Philadelphia. Ig norant bosses who have hag-ridden the country for a century, city, state and nation, have no place in such a scheme of things. They would be unable even to understand the proceedings. . The country, on the contrary, does under stand. For instance, the myth that everything must be written down in the newspapers for the public’s consumption is being exploded. The papers, and the magazines too, such as Harper's, begin having things to say that they really want their readers to hear; more and more editorials shine forth on front pages, the Literary Digest takes form under new manage ment with signed and specially written articles and a weekly Washington letter from Diogenes. John Quincy Adams could be at home in such an awakened America, his brilliantly musing grandson Henry Adams could pursue his never-completed education there. In a word, America is in the capable hands of her forgotten men and they “With the (National Industrial Re covery) Act before us, it is easy to see what it is not. Thus it is emphatically not an effort by government to ‘spoon-feed’ and ‘coddle’ business, to pamper it back to health by artificial governmental sti mulation. At every point the Act throws initiative on industry itself or on industry and labor. It relies, up to the limit, for accomplishment of its objectives on voluntary private effort and coopera tion. . . . (rovernmental action is rele gated to the position of a reserve, to be brought into play only after industrial initiative and voluntary cooperation have failed to materialize. Obviously, such a reserve power in the hands of the govern ment is essential if the Act is to be more than hortatory.” The quotation above is from John Dickinson’s article, Controlled Recovery, in the September Atlantic that came to hand after the Journal’s article was writ ten. Dickinson is assistant secretary of commerce. He himself illustrates the new type of men the Roosevelt adminis tration is calling into the public service. From Harvard Law School, he is professor of public law at the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania; his work on Administrative Justice and the Supremacy of Law is standard, and he helped draft the national industrial recovery act. are organized, in these code-charters of industry, never to be cheated again of their heritage and all to which their children have a right. There are now 48 states. But there arc not so many essential divisions as that. There could be fewer states with resultant advantage to the country, and there is much talk of making fewer. Done now or later, it will eventually be done; mere thought of it shows that people are not thinking so much of state bosses and the advantages of the crimes they committed in the name of their parties and partisans. No movement of industries from the cities to freer domicile in villages and towns is noted, though little but the artificial stands in the way of this for many industries. An investigator reports that the movement doesn’t start because employers like the cities’ larger labor supplies. Industries functioning under charters will not long concern themselves with larger labor supplies than they require. They must soon concern themselves with every man’s right to a wholesome life, which is entirely possible and in all ways desirable under a policy of intranationalism. Such will be the great questions, real and vital questions, presented and threshed out by society as it is newly reorganized in the old-fashioned guilds. In a society that has the question of patents to resolve, for example, how could a boss peddling mere cheap offices and sickly jobs be heard? For this question must soon come up, of patents and inventions and who is to have them. For who is? In the automobile in dustry, or the radio industry, is a new and perhaps revolutionary idea to be patented and exploited by a lucky com pany, or to be shared with all? If you have a job under a guild it can hardly become the prey of fanged competition. So too if you have a store or an export-import business, or a wholesale shop handling groceries. There may be giants in your guild, you a pygmy beside them, but if there is meaning in the slogan new deal it must be supposed that these giants will adhere to the rule that— “ It is not the part of strength to crush, But to shelter and protect.” The potentialities of all such questions call for the nicest adjustment, demand the most capable leadership—a question, for instance, such as the railroads present—and challenge the country’s intelligence. Note that they are all, as they arise, submitted to conferences that are already, in effect, compelling everyone interested in them to think and act as a man would who thought and acted for a guild. It has been Italy’s experience, in the return to guilds, that these grouped themselves into thirteen natural associations, the divergent entities in each association having some paramount mutual interests; and Italy is now so made up politically. No doubt something similar will come about in the new United States. Men will not remain artificially divorced from their own interests by the vain and confused doctrines of sectional parties with selfish eyes only on the public offices and the resources of the treasury. The Founders and their sons saw the dangers of artificial partisanship threatening early America, denounced but could not arrest them. Now, by as happy a revolt of pub'ic opinion as the annals of man kind record, they are definitely repelled. The supreme law, the welfare of the people, finds means in the constitution to dethrone the shyster. Timely that mention, the constitution’s resources against charlatanry and shysterism. Let us see: “ Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof shall direct, a number of electors (for choosing the (Please turn to page 13) October, 1933 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL 13 Some Considerations . . . (Continued from page 5) president^of the United States) equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in the con gress. . . . The electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for two persons. . . . And they shall make a list of all persons voted for and of the number of votes for each. . .. The president of the senate shall, in the presence of the senate and house oi repre sentatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest n umbel* of votes shall be the pres ident, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed. . . . After the choice of president the person having the greatest number of votes shall be the vice-president. This quotation from the constitution as to the manner in which presidents shall be chosen exposes the artificiality of the method that has become fixed practice under the system of formal political parties and their nominating conven tions. Industry being wholly reorganized, as to its administration, and formally chartered, in the United States, natural conjecture is that the conventions interposed between the people and their choice for president will be relegated to desuetude: they, the last props, will be knock ed from under the oldtime state, city and national basses with only such bland tricks in their bag as callow sectionalism and prejudices even worse. For it may not be supposed that men occupied all the time with frequent conferences actually deciding affairs of their own interest, in their own industry, in associated industries, in their state or their industrial region and at Wash ington, will possibly turn aside from all this to tolerate and share the pretenses of party con ventions and soil their hands concocting partisan platforms. No, but as in Italy, American industries, now all coming under charter and therefore amalga mating into guilds, will of course coalesce into associations representative of their common interests. Without platforms at all they will choose electors. The intention of the Founders, that the country be served in the presidency nonpartisanly, as under Roosevelt it is now served, will be realized. And where will the country be then? Why, reassure yourself, it will be back in the competent hands of its people, of its lofig forgotten men and women who have just achieved a revolution as trans cendental as if a million lives had been given in internecine conflict for it. Or, in other words, it will be where it was when John Quincy Adams, a Whig, could negotiate a treaty with England for James Madison, a Democrat (then called Republican!; and where it was when Adams, having been president (and before that, state secretary for Monroe, for whom he wrote the Monroe doctrine—just as Republicans serve Roosevelt this very day), told his neighbors who wanted to send him to congress, if he deemed it not beneath the dignity of a man who had been president, that if they wanted him to be town councilman it wouldn't be beneath his dignity to serve as a councilman, and he would do it. There is no escaping return to politics in America of this high sort, the chartering of industries is inevitably the occasion bringing back to the country such high leadership. But it is possibly objected that the new legis lation is specifically limited io 2 years’ duration. Yes. But were it not so limited, because that is the life of a congress and no congress may bind its successor, 2 centuries might as well have been specified. . in elfect, revolutionary legisla tion such as this paper tries to suggest the pur port of is never repealed. The rule everywhere verified in history is that men Mart to remodel a bit, find they have to rebuild from the ground up, end in building from foundations up. But in the I'nitcd St ites the constitution is still a substantial foundation, only artificialities of an outworn regime need be cast aside. Adjust ment, mostly, is all the president attempts; self-sustaining forthright intranationalism is all the new legislation implies; but it carries with it, of course, new and broader conceptions of self-interest for both capital and labor, and of course the means of dissolution of spurious partisanship. Summing up, it is easy to see, with new land coming into settlement all the time, then world trade expanding, how the United States gjt along awkwardly well with a loose policy of individualism; and too, for at least the pad, decade, it has been quite as easy to see that such a policy is no longer adequate or fitting. The one disturbing thought is that the coalition administration, which Roosevelt’s is, needs time in which to consolidate its position. The corner toward renewed and permanent prosperity will not be definitely turned until chartered industry has worked long enough to show it really has all the merits it presently displays. Besides, men have to find themselves under the new order of things. Values have to fix themselves. Paradoxically, the present is a period of doubt as well as of confidence. Men take up new tools, means of carrying on under the charter codes, but are unskilled to them and a bit re luctant to test them to full capacity. This dubiety affects us all, guides us in everything: in what we invest, what we save, how we con sciously hold bacK, uncertain of the future where our old familiar world has suddenly failed us, then been turned upside down. Yet the word must be,. Ou with the president. —IP. R. Bearing on Philippine Gold ... (Continued from page 6) tical miner by common repute, says there are at least 6 other regions of Masbate equally as promising for gold as the Aroroy region, by the surface indications. In other words, all the mining that has been done in Masbate has not, as Bridle expresses it, scratched CHARTERED BANK OF INADJAD•CXRALIA Capital and Reserve Fund..........................................£6,000,000 Reserve Liability of Proprietors............................... 3,000.000 MANILA BRANCH ESTABLISHED 1872 SUB-BRANCHES AT CEBU, ILOILO AND ZAMBOANGA Every description of banking business transacted. Branches in every important town throughout India, China, Japan, Java, Straits Settlements, Federated Malay States. French Indo-China, Siam, and Borneo; also in New York. Head Office: 38 Bishopsgate, London, E. C. C. E. STEWART. Manager, Berger and Gurley Engineering Instruments Mountain and Mining Transits Brunton Pocket Mine Transits Wye and Dumpy Levels Geologist Compasses Surveyor’s Pocket Compasses Abney Hand Levels Locke’s Hand Levels Chains, etc. H. E. HEACOCK CO. MANILA CEBU — ILOILO — DAVAO the surface. He says the 3 M’s, Masbate, Mindoro, Mindanao, have not even been super ficially explored for gold; and he believes, from what he knows of these islands from look ing them over with a keen miner’s eye, they will all be great gold-bearing islands in the future. The conclusion is, not much has been done in the Philippine goldfields because there has been so very much to do and so very little with which to do it—little cash and few experienced men. By the way, the supposition that the name Mindoro derives from the Spanish Mina de Oro, or Mine of Gold, is in error and may be misleading. Mindoro does not lie in the gold zone, strictly; the name is of native origin and has no reference to gold. While the metal is known to exist on Mindoro, that it is extensive there does not follow. Geologists, of course, because their explora tions have been altogether inadequate to inform them, do not know now extensive gold deposits in the major mineralized zone of the Philippines are, or just where they lie, except as mining knowledge brings this to light. Streams tell most about this, and so many streams have been explored, and have yielded gold from their sands, that it is a good bet now that gold depo sits are practically coextensive with the mineral zone itself. It is also a betting deduction that at thousands of points on this zone gold exists in ore rich enough to be profitably mined and milled by the modern methods now in use at the mines already paying dividends. This is a bold assertion. Its import is tremendous, nothing else than that the Philippines are prob ably the greatest goldfield yet discovered in the world. It stands because the practical and scientific developments are to be carefully watch ed by this journal itself, and independently judged, and on the occasion for the least modifi cation of it, that modification will be made. IN RESPONDING TO ADVERTISEMENTS PLEASE MENTION THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL