Books: The Permanent Revolution

CAPITALISM IN AMERICA (119 pp.)—Frederick Martin Stern—Rlnehart ($2).

When Frederick Martin Stern went to visit the U.S. in 1935, all his well-bred European friends warned him what to expect. Americans were rude, they everlastingly “chased the dollar,” they were cultural midgets. For a while, Frederick Stern looked at the U.S. through morose-colored glasses, waited a good two years before moving his wife and two children from Switzerland to New Rochelle, N.Y. But even before that, he began asking himself a practical businessman’s question: “How did people in the United States manage to build industries and cities so fast, how did they have such opportunities to exploit their individual talents?”

Shake Hands? A friend’s chauffeur gave him one clue to the answer. After driving Stern from New York to Washington, the chauffeur impulsively shot out his hand for a shake, smiled and said he was “pleased to make my acquaintance.” Anywhere in class-conscious Europe, the handshake would have been a terrible gaffe for both of them. Another “new American” told Stern how astonished he had been “when an old workman in a factory patted the president of the company on the back, called him by his first name and offered him a cigar.” To German-born Stern, these homely incidents, multiplied, are the symbols of a social revolution. They testify that, despite the prattle of the Marxists, it is the U.S., not the U.S.S.R., that is creating a classless society.

Just why that should be so is the core of Author Stern’s Capitalism in America, a book which contains some of the best small-arms fire in defense of the American way of life since the shots fired at Concord. Author Stern couches his arguments in the form of lively, colloquial letters to a mythical young European intellectual named Henry, who is thinking of turning Communist.

Escalator Going Up. Advice to Henry boils down to three main points, none entirely new, but all good: 1) that in the U.S., capital and labor do not gouge each other in a maiming class struggle, but join forces with each other—and with the machine—to produce more goods than the world has ever known; 2) that American capitalism (unlike European capitalism), remains dynamic through competition, and greases the social escalator by rewarding brains and skill wherever found; 3) that social equality fosters the production of more wealth, and the production of more wealth fosters social equality—i.e., democracy and capitalism complement each other.

To 61-year-old Stern, misguided Henry is very real, a composite of several young Europeans who have swallowed the Communist myth about the U.S. because they have never had a taste of the real thing. “Maybe we can save their souls,” says Stem hopefully. Thai is also the hope of Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, which are planning to broadcast the letters to all the Henrys within earshot.