The Faces of Five Decades

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When The New Republic celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at a dinner early in 1964, Walter Lippmann reminisced about the spirit that prevailed when he and the five other original editors of the magazine launched what was to become America’s most influential independent journal of opinion. ‘Our purpose was not partisan, factional, personal or ideological,” he said. “It was educational. And the attitude of this journal toward affairs was to be that of the scholar seeking the truth no matter whom it hurts or whom it helps.”

This commitment has produced fifty years of brilliant writing—serious, satirical, indignant, wry—on subjects ranging from the national economy to poetry. The many concerns of civilized people—books, politics, art, foreign affairs—have been unified by the awareness that ultimately it is individuals who, through their ideas and philosophies, give color and shape to their society.

Contents

PREFACE by Gilbert A. Harrison 11

DECADE ONE Lo tA— O23

INTRODUCTION by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 25

Preface

When information can be bounced off a satellite from one continent to another, when news magazines sell in the millions and TV commentators reach millions more, what public need is there for such journals of opinion as The New Republic? The only answer I know is here—in writings selected for this volume from over 2,500 issues of The New Republic over the past fifty years. Taken together they are, I believe, journalism at its best. Many are deadline pieces, written for this and not next week, That they retain their immediacy is all the more remarkable. It is remarkable, too, how many of the controversies that engaged the moral concern of The New Republic twenty-five or fifty years ago still do. Indignation and disillusionment move in and out of these pages, but these seem to me reflections of an indestructible confidence that free men, humane and generous, can make something finer of life. In this sense, The New Republic, though critical in temper, has been a continuous affirmation.

No selection from fifty years of publishing can do justice to many writers who have appeared in the magazine. This volume is primarily a gallery of portraits; in no sense is it a chronology of events. Yet, because men shape events and are shaped by them, a picture of what we Americans have been doing and thinking since 1914 becomes visible. Most of the articles appear as originally written. Where a portrait was part of a larger essay, editorial cuts in some instances have been made, and deletions are indicated by the use of ellipsis. However, no text has been added to or revised, and each is identified by the date it was first published. “T.R.B.,” whose reports from Washington appear throughout this book, is a pseudonym for no one person. The first T.R.B. was the late Frank R. Kent of the Baltimore Sun; the current T.R.B. recently celebrated his twentieth anniversary with The New Republic—anonymously.

Herbert Croly, The New Republic’s founding editor, believed that the vitality of this kind of journalism depended upon “the maintenance of an extremely delicate balance between being specific and being general, being aggressive and conciliatory, and between being practical and being visionary.” The effort to embody this ideal in consecutive weekly issues cannot, as Croly knew, “be more than occasionally successful.”

I wish to thank the authors, or their heirs, who readily granted permission to include copyrighted work in this book. We are indebted also

12 Preface to Anne Fredericks, whose discriminating taste was invaluable in making the initial selections, and to Miss Caryn Levy and Miss Holly Shumway for their help in preparing the manuscript for the printer.

—GmBerT A. HARRISON Editor-in-Chief, The New Republic Washington, D.C., 1964 fats ta LO OE flv EABECADES ic was

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Preliminary sketches for the first cover The New Republic (attributed to Inga Kimball).

Willard Straight, about 1914

Dorothy Whitney Straight (now Mrs. Leonard Elmhirst) founder, with her husband, Willard, of The New Republic. Sketched by Mr. Straight, about the time of their marriage in 1911.

Five members of the original Board of Editors of The New Republic. (The sixth member, not shown, was Charlotte Rudyard.)

Francis Hackett

Herbert Croly

Philip Littell ze a. Yl The original offices of The New Republic, 421 West 21st Street, New York

The Living Room

| IN LESS THAN 36 MONTHS THE CIRCULATION HAS GROWN TO 36000-AND |}

September 1917

THE EXCESS COST OF FILLING A SUBSCRIPTION HAS DROPPED FROM S21 To $1 ff

NOMEWHERE in the near distance is a point where there are no more red bars. it

is a point The New Republic will have to reach in order to continue the voyage with ‘bat econ-

November 1916 and the needed readers at 30000. But the cost of publishing ihe paper turned abnormal, and the date and number ceased to hold. Any prediction made to-day to be sound omic justification that comes with paying your | way. It is a point in time as well as a number of readers. .Last year we put the time as must leave both open. One thing is plain: it is readers alone and still more readers who have the destiny of the New Republic ship in hand.

[8] {9]

A spread from an early appeal for subscribers, charting the circulation growth of The New Republic in its first three years.

-Q TO SAIL TO SEA IN A SHIP?

PASSAGE TO MORE THAN INDIA, PASSAGE TO YOU, TO MASTERSHIP OF YOU, YE STRANGLING PROBLEMS.

— WALT WHITMAN

“HE NEW JUIFURLIC, DECEMINBR orb. Inez

Bruce Bliven, member of the Board of Editors of The New Republic from 1923 to 1946. (RIGHT) Edmund Wilson, literary critic and member of the journal’s Board of Editors from 1926 to 1940.

Michael Straight, youngest son of Dorothy ig Willard Straight, who served as editor ands publisher of The New Republic from 1941 to 1953. (RIGHT) Gilbert A. Harrison, present owner and editor-in-chief of The New Republic

PECADE ONE 1914-1923

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The Two Mr. Wilsons

French Opinion on the War The New Profession of City Manager The Stockholm Conference Lazy Verse

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A Prosperous New Year?

Snuith’s Valedictory as Governor What Are the New Cruisers For?

Justice Holmes and the Liberal Mind by JOUN DEWEY

The Real Issue at Havana by MAURITS A. HALLGREN

Trees and Art

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Robert Littell on Our Senators “The Cave of Winds”

Bruce Bliven on the Follies “Slaves of the Roof”

CARL SANDBURG ON CHICAGO

“THE WINDY CITY Bertrand Russell on America “Hofes and Fears, I.”

Stark Young on Eugene O'Neill's “The Hoiry Age”

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1914-1923

The year 1914 can be said to have marked the high noon of American progressivism. More than a decade of political and intellectual ferment seemed at last to be reaching happy fulfillment. The New Republic, founded late in that year, appeared above all as the child of the enlightenment.

Yet it was a child with many fathers. Progressivism, as historians have subsequently discovered, was more complicated than it looked. It was, in essence, a spirit of critical inquiry into established ideas and institutions—this, and a conviction that events could be shaped by reason. But though the progressive spirit cast a bright light, it did so with a confusion of beams. It was at once innocent and sophisticated, idealistic and skeptical, moralistic and relativist, self-righteous and selfaccusatory. Some progressives were Hamiltonians, some Jeffersonians. Some favored the acceptance and control of industrial concentration; others wanted an economy of freely competing small units. Some were internationalists, others isolationists. Some were avant-garde, others conventional or even reactionary in artistic matters. Progressivism, in short, was a bundle of contradictions held together by a common middle-class ethos and by a common moral energy.

In years to come, as the West entered its time of cumulative crisis, the contradictions would clash and thereby dissipate some of the energy—a process which The New Republic would faithfully reflect and record. But in 1914 this was still in the future. The present was a season of political hope and of artistic release. Woodrow Wilson was well launched in a reform program which promised to complete the work of Theodore Roosevelt in humanizing industrial society. James and Dewey had begun the reconstruction of American philosophy. Beard and Robinson were bringing new excitement to the study of history. The arts were in a state of exuberant creativity, discarding the exhausted forms of the past in the quest for a new immediacy of experience. The New Republic was conceived in this atmosphere of confidence. Oniy the offstage noises of the guns of August threatened the prevailing optimism.

The new magazine was particularly the voice of Eastern, metropolitan progressivism. It was intellectual, stylish, urbane—remote in mood, if not in politics, from the evangelical progressivism of La Follette in Wisconsin or Hiram Johnson in California. Its editor, Herbert Croly, had written five years before, in The Promise of American Life, the most substantial essay in progressive political thought; he had attended

Harvard and had been an editor of the Architectural Record. The magazine's backer, Willard Straight, after graduating from Cornell, had worked for such pillars of the Eastern establishment as J. P. Morgan's and the Department of State; his wife, Dorothy Whitney, came from a fashionable New York family. Two of the other editors, Walter Lippmann and Philip Littell, were Harvard men; Walter Weyl had gone to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania; Francis Hackett was an Irishman; Charlotte Rudyard a Vassar girl. Together they proposed to patrol the fields of politics and culture, seeking, through reasoned analysis and muted wit, to raise small insurrections, as Croly liked to put it, in men’s minds.

The First World War broke out on the day The New Republic opened its offices—a portent for the future. By the time the first issue appeared on November 7, 1914, a shadow had begun to fall across the progressive enlightenment. But for a time, the magazine retained a sober confidence that reason could influence events. Its editors were close to men of power, first to Theodore Roosevelt, later, if not to Wilson, at least to Colonel House. As the European war became more insistent, The New Republic followed Wilson in supporting neutrality and then in demanding participation. But war brought disenchantment, and the progressive hope began to falter. Walter Weyl and John Maynard Keynes saw Wilson’s trip to Paris as a pilgrimage of betrayal, while Charles Merz, later to be editor of The New York Times, discerned the future on a front porch in Marion, Ohio. By the end of the decade, with the Treaty of Versailles and the election of Harding to the Presidency, disillusion was well advanced.

Defeated in the hope of direct influence on public policy, the magazine in the twenties turned an increasingly caustic look on the foibles and excesses of American life in the age of Calvin Coolidge, Henry Ford and Emile Coué. H. L. Mencken sounded the anarchic keynote in his “Meditation in E Minor” (and in his meditation on Mencken, Philip Littell added a characteristic New Republic caution about the dangers of anarchy). S. N. Behrman, dissecting the advertising man as “the genius of America,” anticipated the attack on the gray flannel suit by a generation. At the same time, The New Republic enlarged its concern for culture. Two distinguished critics, Stark Young and Paul Rosenfeld, wrote brilliantly about the theater and music; and Bernard Shaw and Clive Bell brought transatlantic viewpoints to the discussion of the arts. Beginning hopefully in 1914 as the organ of a progressive majority in a progressive era, the magazine saw itself a decade later as the voice of a civilized minority in an era of Babbitts. Progressive idealism was now less a cause than a refuge. —ArrHur M. SCHLESINGER, Jr.

December 5, 1914 [Vachel Lindsay]

SINCERITY IN THE MAKING by Randolph Bourne

You must hear Mr. Lindsay recite his own “Congo,” his body tense and swaying, his hands keeping time like an orchestral leader to his own rhythms, ,-his tone changing color in response to the noise and savage imagery of the lines, the riotous picture of the Negro mind set against the weird background of the primitive Congo, the “futurist” phrases crashing through the scene like a glorious college yell—you must hear this yourself, and learn what an arresting, exciting person this new indigenous Illinois poet is. He has a theory of his work, which Miss Monroe has supported in Poetry [Magazine], that he is carrying back the half-spoken, half-chanted singing of the American vaudeville stage to its old Greek precedent of the rhapsodist’s lyric, where the poet was composer and reciter in one. After hearing the now so well-known “General Booth Enters into Heaven,” and the “Santa-Fé Trail,” and “The Firemen’s Ball,” one’s imagination begins to run away with the idea of this Greek rhapsodist-vaudeville stage, where one could get the color and the smash of American life interpreted on a higher and somewhat more versatile plane than is now presented. One finds oneself beginning irresistibly, “Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,” or “Booth led boldly with his big bass drum,” and whirling along to rhapsodic improvisation of one’s own. The explicitly poetical stage directions which accompany these poems “to be read aloud or chanted” initiate the reader at once into the art, and rather spoil him for the tame business of reading. One hopes that these verses must have come in sweeps of improvisation as the poet swung along on one of his vagabond walks through the interminable prairies of the West. They sound as if they had been shouted to the winds and the clouds, their gaudy rhythms marking time for the slow roll of the sun over the blistering skys.

Mr. Lindsay has tried every variety of verse from children’s poems to political and up-to-date war poems... . He has reminiscences of every kind of poetic diction and philosophy and creed and moral attitude. One poem stamps him Christian, the next agnostic, the next socialist, the next aesthete or rapt vulgarian at the “movies.” It is all tumbled in with an astonishing insensitiveness to what is banal and what is strong... .

Mr. Lindsay is concentratedly American, and his work and career are an illumination of the American soul. If that American soul had ever had any genuine hunger for the beauty of town and countryside which Europe clothes itself in, it would long ago have created that beauty, and not left itself to starve in shabbiness. The poet on his walk seems not to have found natural American beauty down through that long stretch of Missouri and Kansas, nor does he seem to have been saddened at its absence. One thinks of the visual richness of English vagabonds like Borrow and Jeffries, and is amazed at the thinness and poverty of these impressions. A few flowers along the railroad track, plenty of queer people, wheat interminable, but little hint of the quality of the life lived and the highhearted scenery. Perhaps it is because Mr. Lindsay is too much of a poet not to require verse, for several of his Kansas poems do send long vistas down the mind that has never seen the West, and one still feels through these lines the torturing violence of a nature almost too big for man. The powerful orginality of all this later work means the hope that he will leave this other apprenticing with ideas alone forever, and enter at last into his sincerity.

January 23, 1915 [The Unemployed]

EQUALITY by Walter E. Weyl

Last evening I happened by accident upon a strange coming together of the ends of New York. Seated on couches and chairs in the spacious, unpretentious drawing room were unemployed men, recruited from the bread line and the lodginghouses. These unemployed—there were some thirty of them—were the guests of men and women prominent in the city government and in social reform. They had been called in to give their advice to experts, to explain how relief work should be organized, to discuss the infinitely complex problem of unemployment. It seems absurd and sentimental, does it not? And yet it was evident that the expert learned much from these harassed men, who knew how unemployment hurts, and I took pride in city officials willing to study in such a book.

As I listened to these unemployed, as I heard these famished wanderers tell of the monotonous horrors of their life, of trudging night

Equality : Walter E.Weyl 29 after night through cold, empty streets, of sleeping amid vermin on foul lodginghouse floors or on chairs in the stench of low saloons, of deprivation, of degradation, of despair, I felt infinitely abased. I looked about me at the well-clad solicitous men and women who had come to meet them, and in their faces read the same shame that I found in my own heart, the same leaden guilt of living in such a world. But for the happy bulwark of circumstance they too might have sunk into the abyss and joined this despised regiment, useless because unused. What could the fed say to the unfed? What hope could they extend? What did their slow plans for social regeneration mean to wretches whose life would be crushed out long before such plans could mature?

Only the unemployed were without constraint, for they had the tragic dignity of hopelessness. They stood up boldly, spoke not unwisely, and showed no humility before men who might have housed and fed them for months without noticing the cost. It struck me suddenly that these unemployed men, being Americans, possessed more self-assurance than Englishmen or Germans in like case would have possessed. These wanderers, despised even by pickpockets, held the stubborn conviction that after all they were human beings and citizens, equal to the others in all respects except the accident of money.

Of course they were not equal, if that word means anything. They had not the health, the vigor, the firm intellectual grasp. They could not reason a thing out; they were too obsessed by the sordid trifles that had become their life. Some were weak because they had grown up in an evil environment; some, no doubt, were handicapped before birth by a fatal heredity. What does equality mean when men are as unequal as these? What equality could exist between us, who sat apart, secure and fed, and these friendless unemployed, soon to be let out again upon the street, soon to be redelivered to the life that skirts the land of beggary and crime.

We tried desperately to be equal; it was the least we could do. Were we not all men and brothers? We used the title “brother” as men do when in the absence of all social bonds they appeal to the last shred, our common humanity. But though our will was excellent, though we were all engaged upon a single problem, it was not possible even for the short space of three hours to keep down the barrier. The two groups instinctively separated. The unemployed were addressed as “you fellows,” “friends,” “boys,” but the title “gentlemen,” which is in vogue in almost every section, was not used. Could it have been used without derision? Is a man a gentleman with whom society deals so ungently? To use that term of equality to one whom you can save from slow starvation or permit to starve, whom you can raise by a nod or condemn to misery is to mock him, as though you offered a flask of perfume to a wretch dying of hunger.

There can be no equality, nor any approach to equality, except among men economically independent and economically comparable. You may talk of equality and fraternity, of equal civil rights, of equal political rights, of the brotherhood of man and all the rest, but unless your man has a secure economic position, a chance to earn his living in dignity and honor, he has no rights whatsoever. Political equality is a farce and a peril unless there is at least some measure of economic equality. What does it avail the poor devil trudging the streets without a chance of bed or breakfast, that he is an equal American citizen with a vote? For what or whom shall he vote? What interest has he in all our fine political schemes, in economy and efficiency, in democracy and progress, when he himself after election as before is without a job and hungry? If such a man sell his political influence for whatever he can get, who is there to blame him?

We shall not advance far in working out our American ideals without striking hard at this inequality which has grown with the growth of society and which produces insane fortunes at the top and destitution at the bottom. When we talk of inequality, we mean inequality of possessions, inequality of income, inequality of industrial opportunity. It is not an easy task to eradicate this inequality, nor is it one which can be solved in a year or a decade, for the evil is rooted in complex conditions and in strong human instincts, and some of it is an inevitable result of quite healthy economic processes. Inequality, even in its worst manifestations, will last long, for the very reason that it means political inequality, for the very reason that the man of great fortune is the controller of other men’s lives and other men’s opinions and votes, and that those who have absolutely nothing join with those who have too much. The road to equality is difficult and long. We shall not even approach our goal without a national understanding of this problem, nor without radical economic readjustments, which will prevent excessive private accumulation at its source, and give to men at the bottom of society the economic as well as the educational bases of independence.

MR. ROCKEFELLER ON THE STAND by Walter Lippmann

Mr. Rockefeller seemed terribly alone on Monday when he faced the Industrial Relations Commission. There was an atmosphere of no quarter. A large crowd watching intensely every expression of his face, about twenty cameras and a small regiment of newspapermen, a shorthand reporter at his elbow, and confronting him the Commissioners led by the no means reassuring Mr. Walsh—except for an indefatigably kindly police sergeant who gave him one glass of water after another, not much was done to pamper the witness. He met what he knew to be his accusers with the weary and dogged good humor of a child trying to do a sum it does not understand for a teacher who will not relent.

From the first Mr. Rockefeller was on the defensive. He began by reading the long statement which was printed that evening in the newspapers. The statement was very carefully prepared; much thought and labor had evidently gone into it, but as a matter of style it did not sound in the least like anything that Mr. Rockefeller had to say on his direct oral examination. Perhaps we did him an injustice, but it never occurred to us to suppose that Mr. Rockefeller had written the document himself. Nevertheless, Mr. Rockefeller read the paper well.

But it was much too smooth to be convincing. When he read with warm emphasis that “combinations of capital are sometimes conducted in an unworthy manner, contrary to law and in disregard of the interest both of labor and the public,” we wondered whom he had in mind. Nor were we any more enlightened as to what he really stood for when he said that “such combinations cannot be too strongly condemned nor too vigorously dealt with.” He read those sentences with sincere indignation and without betraying the slightest self-consciousness. To the charge that he has enforced an industrial absolutism in Colorado, he replied with much feeling that “an attitude toward industry and toward labor such as is here implied is so abhorrent to me personally and so contrary to the spirit of my whole purpose and training that I cannot allow these allegations to pass unnoticed. . . . While it has been said that I have exercised an absolute authority in dictating to the management of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, it has also been said that I have been too indifferent, and that as a director I should have exercised more authority. Clearly, both cannot be true.”

Yet it seemed to me as I listened to him that both could be true, and that in fact it was just such a dilemma which was the truth. For while the reality of the Rockefeller power could hardly be questioned, the use of that power appeared to have been secondhand and inadequate. For ten years Mr. Rockefeller had not seen his property; his relation to it was by letter and by conference with the officials. What he knew of it must have come to him from them, and, as he has confessed, he trusted their word. Now when we speak of the despotism of the Czar of Russia, we do not mean that he in person acts despotically in every province of his empire. We mean that a despotic hierarchy exists owing allegiance to him as its titled head. We know that if the Czar wished to liberalize his government he would find himself hampered by his subordinate officials. But he has to bear the responsibility for the things that are done in his name, and because he has potential power he is blamed not only for what he does but for what he doesn’t do.

This seemed to be the predicament of Mr. Rockefeller. I should not believe that he personally hired thugs or wanted them hired; I should not believe that the inhumanity of Colorado is something he had conceived. It seems far more true to say that his impersonal and halfunderstood power has delegated itself into unsocial forms, that it has assumed a life of its own which he is almost powerless to control. If first impressions count for anything, I should describe Mr. Rockefeller as a weak despot governed by a private bureaucracy which he is unable to lead. He has been thrust by the accident of birth into a position where he reigns but does not rule; he has assumed a title to sovereignty over a dominion which he rarely visits, about which his only source of information is the reports of men far more sophisticated and far less sensitive than he himself.

His intellectual helplessness was the amazing part of his testimony. Here was a man who represented an agglomeration of wealth probably without parallel in history, the successor to a father who has with justice been called the high priest of capitalism. Freedom of enterprise, untrammeled private property, the incentives of the profiteer, culminate in the achievements of his family. He is the supreme negation of all equality, and unquestionably a symbol of the most menacing fact in the life of the republic. Yet he talked about himself on the commonplace moral assumptions of a small businessman. There never was anybody less imperial in tone than John D., Jr. The vastness of his position seemed to have no counterpart in a wide and far-reaching imagination. Those who listened to him would have forgiven him much if they had felt that they were watching a great figure, a real master of men, a person of some magnificence. But in John D. Rockefeller, Jr., there seemed to be nothing but a young man having a lot of trouble, very much harassed and very well-meaning. No sign of the statesman, no quality of leadership in large affairs, just a careful, plodding, essen-

Billy Sunday : Francis Hackett 33 tially uninteresting person who justifies himself with simple moralities and small-scale virtues.

His tragedy is that of all hereditary power, for there is no magic in inheritance, and sooner or later the scion of a house is an incompetent. Yet the complicated system over which he presides keeps him in an uncomfortably exalted position, where all men can see its absurdity. It is the weak monarch who finally betrays the monarchy. It is the unimaginative, blundering, good-natured king who pays for the acts of his predecessors. Those who rule and have no love of power suffer much. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., is one of these, I think, and he is indeed a victim. The failure of the American people to break up his unwieldy dominion has put a man who should have been a private citizen into a monstrously public position where even the freedom to abdicate is denied him.

BILLY SUNDAY by Francis Hackett

Before I heard Billy Sunday in Philadelphia I had formed a conception of him from the newspapers. First of all, he was a baseball player become revivalist. I imagined him as a ranting, screaming vulgarian, a mob orator who lashed himself and his audience into an ecstasy of cheap religious fervor, a sensationalist whose sermons were fables in slang. I thought of him as vividly, torrentially abusive, and I thought of his revival as an orgy in which hundreds of sinners ended by streaming in full view to the public mourmers’ bench. With the penitents I associated the broken humanity of Magdalen, disheveled, tearful, prostrate, on her knees to the Lord. I thought of Billy Sunday presiding over a meeting that was tossed like trees in a storm.