WAR & PEACE: Pursuit of Happiness

WAR & PEACE

Ten years ago next week the U. S. entered the tenth and worst depression in its history. On the morning of October 24, 1929, the stockmarket that had been slowly declining skidded sickeningly, plunged down, and kept on going. Unknown to anybody, its future unforeseen, its consequences incalculable, the Great Depression set in. But it was not called that. The names that people give to things reveal what they think about them, and the name that the U. S. gave to its crisis was the ringing and melodramatic Crash.

It was the beginning of a national emergency, perhaps the greatest since the period when an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, brooding over a political speech, decided to let the phrase, “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” remain in the text. Off in the unknown future lay a sequence of collisions and calamities, no one of which would have been believed for a minute by the industrious philosophers of 1929. While the echoes of the crash were still rolling, the ardent Charles Mitchell, supersalesman of the boom years, said calmly, “I am still of the opinion that the reaction has badly overrun itself.” Jimmy Walker, defeating Fiorello LaGuardia for Mayor of New York, asked that movie houses show only cheerful pictures in an attempt to brighten the general gloom. A world that saw full-page advertisements offering Manhattan apartments for $45,000 a year, and sable coats for $30,000 to $50,000—a world so jittery that a decline in U. S. Steel to $195 a share meant a panic—would not have believed that the national wealth could drop by some $62,000,000,000 in a few years, or that the nation could survive if it did.

Survivors. But last week as the first stages of another crisis dominated men’s minds, and bred grim forebodings of the future, the survivors of the last appeared more numerous and more meaningful than the casualties. Theoreticians of the movies in 1929, pondering the box office of Broadway Melody and wondering if the talkies were here to stay, could not have believed that 1938-39 would see the movies’ greatest success—not a musical with an all-star cast, but an animated cartoon based on a German fairy tale, Snow White, in which dwarfs, gentle beasts, magic, and witchcraft were combined for the pleasure of children. Still less could they have visualized Pinocchio (see cut, p. 33) which promised to be more successful. No prophet of 1929, peering into the coming decade, could foresee the growth and acceptance of a native American art—the Iowa landscapes of Grant Wood, serene and sunny; the turbulent Missourians of Thomas Benton (see cut, p. 31), calling up the hard-eyed, banjo-playing, riverboat life of the Central South; the innocent art of John Kane, who put the steel mills and freight trains of Pittsburgh on canvas for the first time and who took machinery in his stride. “Look at those trains!” he said, as he painted Turtle Creek Valley with the green hills and the red brick houses in the background, beyond the smoky railroad yards. “Look at those trains, gaily defying me to paint them right!”

As the Great Depression sank in, many a layman and many a sociologist pondered on what the next ten years would bring. Rightly they foresaw a decade of struggle, of widespread distress, of mounting tension. Hopefully some of them dreamed of a return of the bull market whose knell was sounded when the clang of the bell ended trading on Oct. 24. Gloomily, more of them saw ruin ahead, riots, revolution, convulsions and crisis. On schedule the tests of U. S. strength arrived: unemployment increased, banks failed, riots shook the country.

But last week the U. S. looked as complex, bustling, contradictory, as ever:

>The National Automobile Show opened in Manhattan in a blaze of color (see p. 90), with new models, lower prices, promises for a big year, with General Motors’ Alfred Sloaa the U. S. No. 1 automaker.

>Month of October is the month of labor union conventions as well as the apple harvest: the A. F. of L., representing 4,006,354 last week in Cincinnati; the C. I. O. this week to San Francisco (see p. 27). Off to San Francisco went Brother John Lewis to chairman delegates of what claimed to be the U. S. No. 1 labor organization (its membership last year 4,037,877), certain proof that when the U. S. went into the trade union business, it went into it in a big way.

>Month of October is also the month of Hospital drives, Community Chest drives. For the U. S.’s No. 1 charitarian rich man, John D. Rockefeller Jr., it was a busy week, with not only charity but a ceremony attendant on the presentation by the French Government of the Diplome de Grand Prix to Radio City Music Hall’s Rockettes. Meanwhile, at one of his father’s endowments, the University of Chicago, President Robert Maynard Hutchins announced that Chicago, would gladly take over Oxford’s Rhodes scholars during the war.

> U. S. Heavyweight Champion Joe Louis had abundantly demonstrated his ability to beat anybody.

>Industrious, photo-dramatic, cheek-puffing, eyebrow-waving Fiorello LaGuardia, Mayor of New York, was generally considered the best mayor of the world’s largest city. Last week even his old rival, Jimmy Walker, admitted it.

> Reporting the new crisis that demonstrated how much more important it had become, Radio went into action with 774 stations, with radio sets in 26,666,000 American homes, with RCA its No. 1 radio corporation, its President David Sarnoff the U. S. No. 1 radioman.

> This month the Boston Conference on Distribution met, argued about production and distribution, decided that high costs of distribution were a big factor in the U. S. dilemmas. Meanwhile silent, big-tied Distributor John Hartford, president of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co., ran the world’s biggest chain store, distributed more food to more people, and probably more cheaply than any organization had ever distributed it.

> The Chase National Bank, with its Chairman Winthrop Aldrich, its 43 branches, and its offices in ten cities, last week revealed that it had on hand some $3,097,011,177.46 with no place to go, that it had become the world’s biggest bank.

Had anyone, on the panicky night of Oct. 24, 1929, freed his mind of the prevailing depression long enough to consider the U. S. in October, 1939, he might have foreseen the end of prohibition. But nothing in the world of 1929 or in its habits of thought would have prepared him for the surprises of 1939; for the emergence of women in independent political roles, for such phenomena as that of Pundit Dorothy Thompson, gravely lecturing businessmen who would have regarded her as a hopeless Red before the crash had taken its toll of their certainties. But deeply familiar would have been a Congress debating as it did last week under the same old rules and a top-hatted nine-man Supreme Court paying its respects at the White House.

Heavy as was the cost of the depression in terms of human distress, its intellectual wreckage was almost as great; like those dump heaps of wrecked cars that lie out-side U. S. towns, U. S. brains contained large and unsightly piles of wrecked theories, junked plans, smashed hopes—a wheel off an old 1933 model Technocracy, an axle from Share the Wealth, a busted headlight from Production for Use, fragments of Marxism and the planned economy, half-a-dozen old Utopias that never ran. Here & there under the wreckage were old pieces of twisted slogans, moneychangers out of the temple, 114 days left to save America, grass in the streets, a blue eagle.

So great was the wreckage and so widespread the crisis that what the U. S. had left in the way of wits, worldly goods and political institutions, looked impressive. No catalogue could communicate the wealth of U. S. natural resources, no two experts could wholly agree about the maze of surplus commodities, farm income, legislative measures, mortgages, Government loans, the export market, yield per acre, drought and erosion, that is known as the agricultural problem. But in simple, physical terms, the U. S. still had, after ten years of Depression:

Enough Land. Over the Middle West, through the Deep South and into Texas, through the corn belt, the wheat belt, the cotton belt, from the potato farms of Maine and Idaho to the orange groves of Florida and California, the 25 kinds of soils in the U. S. gave up their annual products. There were 6,288,648 farms in the country in 1929, with a total acreage of 986,771,016; there were 6,812,350 in 1939, covering 1,054,515,111 of the 1,900,000,000 acres in the U. S. The week the war began:

> The corn crop was one of the heaviest in recent U. S. history; the tobacco crop broke records; the wheat crop, already in (with spring wheat covering the fields of Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, with a yellowish-brown six-inch stubble) was estimated at 736,115,000 bushels.

> In the great diamond-shaped area that begins around Marietta, at the junction of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers and which, spreading westward, reaches north to around Red Wing, Minn., south to the Republican River in Kansas and west to the foothills of the Wild Cat Mountains in western Nebraska—throughout this region corn stood from eight to twelve feet high, and the estimate stood at 2,523,092,000 bushels—53% of the world’s total.

>The cotton that had once been called the king of a kingless country, and which like a dethroned monarch of agriculture forever conspired to rule again grew in its inexhaustible luxuriance—over the eight States south of the Ohio and the James; east of the shallow, wandering Brazos that flows from dusty New Mexico to the grey waters of the Gulf near Galveston Bay. In little patches hanging on the hillsides of Tennessee; in the red soil of Georgia; in big plantations along the Black Warrior and Coosa in Alabama, in poverty-stricken tenant farms and rundown sharecropping holdings, in syndicate-owned plantations bigger than collective farms, in 25,000,000 acres of the U. S. cotton grew to produce 11,412,000 bales, almost 50% of the world’s total.

> Most of its potato crop of 364,208,000 bushels was in, and rows of dusty vines, weeds, crabgrass covered the stripped fields of Idaho; the half-buried potato houses were filled. Rice production was set at 50,000,000 bushels; sugar beets at 10,677,500 tons.

Only a really brazen lover of the country could dote on these agricultural beauties without noting the rags and tatters that concealed some of them for many people and blotted them out entirely for others. U. S. farmers had little share of prosperity in the years before the crash. Depression deepened the problem, left farmers carrying into it a mortgage debt almost equal to income. In every 1,000 farms during the first six years of depression, 236 were foreclosed. Average value of farm land dropped from $48.52 to $31.16 per acre.

But in terms of national wealth and productive capacity, the U. S. had no need to feel a sense of weakness or hopelessness about its land, unless it enjoyed a feeling of weakness or hopelessness. It also had:

Enough Machines, Mines, Men. After ten years of hard times that shook the country from top to bottom, statisticians could count

> 166,794 industrial plants of all kinds.

> 20,000,000 industrial workers.

> 359,045 producing oil wells.

> 250,000 miles of railroads.

>They found that the U. S. produced 34% of the world’s coal; 32% of its copper; 35% of its electric power; 29% of its iron ore; 62% of its oil; 78% of its sulphur; 22% of its lead; 79% of its passenger automobiles and 66% of its trucks; 30% of its cotton and 67% of its silk goods; 67% of its rubber goods; 43% of its chemicals; 90% of its movies.

But no catalogue could communicate the dimensions or the intricacy of the industrial organization, with its infinite interconnections and interdependencies, the relationships that tied it to areas as well as to industries. In Boston itself only 219 of the 5,443 manufacturing plants made boots and shoes, but shoes in Lynn and Worcester, shoe machinery in Lynn and Boston, cotton woven goods in Providence, Fall River, New Bedford, textile machinery and parts in Worcester, nonferrous metal alloys, edge tools and electrical machinery in Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, created an industrial organization that employed more than 1,000,000, produced a large share of the U. S.’s 400,000,000 pairs of shoes a year, helped consume 80% of the 23,000,000 cattle hides that moved from the Western ranges, through the stockyards of Omaha, Kansas City, Chicago, through the tanning factories of Newark, Gloversville.

The steel industry, with its 410 steel mills centred around Pittsburgh, Chicago and Birmingham so vast that the four largest can produce more steel than all Germany. The automobile industry which in a year produces 2,500,000 motor cars and could produce about 6,000,000, which directly or indirectly employs 6,380,000 workmen, which in a year uses 176,000 tons of iron, 329,900 tons of rubber; 63,000,000 square feet of plate glass; 21,156,000 feet of leather upholstery; 191,700 tons of lead; 12,600,000 pounds of nickel; 619,434 bales of cotton; 100,000,000 sq. ft. of hardwood; 19,718,000,000 gallons of gasoline; 16,000,000 Ibs. of wool; 6,300,000 lbs. of mohair; 256,000 cattle hides; 590,000 tons of sugar cane; 1,115,000 bushels of corn; 4,828,200 lbs. of turpentine; 18,590 lbs. of beeswax; 36,000 hogs. The oil industry, most extraordinary and dramatic of them all, with the pumps slowly chugging in the exhausted fields of Pennsylvania, with the wells sinking two miles deep in California and Louisiana, with rigs floating in barges penetrating the mud of the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, with its 96,612 miles of pipe lines running from Oklahoma to New Jersey and crisscrossing the continent like veins under its skin, with the fields of East or West Texas or central Louisiana calling for supply houses at Fort Worth, Tulsa, Corpus Christi, with the thousands of flares burning the escaping gas, hissing as they burn, lighting up the derricks and stretching out under the wind like yellowish acetylene pennants of flame.

Nothing in the physical structure of industry, in the inventive genius of the U. S., in its plant capacity, in its ordinary workaday life, could account for a sense of hopelessness or weakness in facing it. There remained the unemployed, the ramifications of the problem they presented, doubt as to whether they could be put to work. But in ten years of depression, the U. S. had demonstrated that it possessed, as a natural resource more valuable than its mines:

Enough Flexibility. Although no two experts could wholly agree on detailed programs, no observer could doubt that ten years of depression had given the U. S. the greatest sociological education in its history. Incorporated into its Government were basic social laws no one of which could have been calmly argued or dreamed of by the dejected empiricists of 1929. Incorporated into its thought was an acceptance of social reform, no matter how hotly disputed were particular reform measures. Accepted by its major parties were the basic evolutionary changes represented by social security laws, trade union legislation, relief, social welfare—although fundamental to U. S. Government were knock-down-and-drag-out fights over particulars.

At whatever cost, the U. S. had demonstrated its ability to adjust itself to social needs, had after ten years the value of the experience of social reform, had in addition an aggregation of measures, laws, decisions in principle agreed to. It had the NLRB that put into law the belief that strong trade unions were of social value (“This is the greatest work of my life,” said Senator Wagner), and although the San Francisco Stock Exchange threatened to move to Reno if “ham-and-eggs” went through in California, innovations generally led to no such drastic action. At whatever cost, the accomplishments of reform remained: TVA, reforestation, soil erosion control, Grand Coulee.

Standards of Living. Economists might dispute about actual U. S. standards of living. Statisticians might collect masses of figures—as they did—to document the standards of living at different income levels. Politicians might argue over the highest standard possible for the U. S., humanitarians might concentrate on the needs at the lowest income level, even Hollywood might try dramatizing the plight of one third of a nation. But the essential U. S. standard, as the yardstick by which it measured its prosperity, did not shrink in ten years of depression. Advertisements in U. S. magazines and newspapers showed that citizens wanted the same things. No orators plumped for lowering the standard to conform to conditions; the demand was to change conditions to conform to the standard.

In no way was this clearer than in the way the U. S. used its leisure. Citizens bought more tennis racquets, handballs, oil paints, golf balls, shot guns, archery sets, ping pong tables, croquet sets, duck decoys, fishing tackle, riding boots, bathing suits, bicycles, travel books, pianos, phonograph records, violins, skis, garden seed, sailboats—a vast index of their tastes and needs, as fundamental to the U. S. temperament as the commercialism generally applied to it. If the iron ore of the Mesabi made it inevitable that there should be a vast steel industry in the U. S., the first glimpse of the Rockies, steel-blue and airy, made it inevitable that there would always be a U. S. market for pack saddles; and the first glimpse of the Yellowstone or the Shoshone bounding down the endless rapids insured the making of canoes. The Pursuit of Happiness that surges through American history as deeply as the protection of life and liberty, that remained alive even through the heartbreaking days of the Civil War, remained alive through ten years of depression. It was in the millions of citizens who peacefully pottered around making things in basements and backyards, the tinkerers with old automobiles, the congenital polishers of hunting rifles, the methodical makers of artificial flies; it was in the people who swelled attendance at baseball games and football games, the millions of vacations that led everywhere: to picnic groves along the Missouri, where the sun coming through the cottonwood and maple gives them a coppery, luminous glow; to ranches in Wyoming, where the Sweetwater and Clark Fork curve through the rocky canyons; to the dunes of Cape Cod and the bayous of Louisiana. It was exploratory, adventurous, inventive, inquisitive, it was the acceptance of struggle and hazard—it was anything except a resigned or a bitter acceptance of a real or a mythical fate.

Mood. For its land, its machines, its material, its people and history, the U. S. had no reason, ten years after the crash, to be conscious of anything but a sense of strength. There were a few spiritual straws in the wind—Abe Lincoln, classic figure of U. S. idealism, turned up in last year’s best play, in one of this year’s best movies, is soon to reappear as a leading figure on the national scene when Carl Sandburg publishes the four volumes of his biography this winter. But the general mood was wrong. It could be diagnosed in different ways—as cynicism, boredom, a spiritual impasse; as the natural heritage of the depression, a failure of education; as a result of the curb on initiative. To the editor of the Jackson, Miss. Daily News, as to many an editor, it seemed that “we have been in danger of being poisoned by a sense of helplessness and dependence on the Government… the poison has entered the bloodstream of our national life.”

To a reporter noting the ways and moods of the people as the years ran their course, it seemed that after the first sharp struggle with the crisis, the attitude of the people toward it and their own ways shifted. The youth coming out of colleges that seemed on the surface to give more, entering a world where they felt themselves blocked; their parents, dominated by moods arising from a social crisis for which their education had not prepared them—against the broad perspective of the depression, the U. S. use of its leisure and wealth seemed limited. As routines are necessary to civilized life, yet are fatal if life becomes all routine, an element of tediousness entered the U. S. scene: it was as if the dynamic Pursuit of Happiness in political as well as in social life was turning insensibly into the search for security and the escape from boredom.

To a philosopher it seemed that one of the menaces of society lay in the boredom that grows in the absence of great ideas. To Professor Alfred North Whitehead, great ideas involved “a sense of the worth of life . . . that sense of importance which nerves all civilized effort. . . . The absence of a coordinating philosophy of life, spread throughout the community, spells decadence, boredom and the slackening of effort.”

Great Ideas. In this mood the prewar world turned into a world at war. As the bombs fell in Poland, all over the U. S. citizens turning on their radios heard King George VI say: “We are at war. … To meet the challenge of a principle which, if it were to prevail, would be fatal to any civilized order in the world.”

But no more than they could believe that a great idea was involved in the first panic of the crash, could U. S. citizens believe that civilization was at stake in the war. The Southern editor who wrote “Why are we puzzled? The issues of this war are very plain. It is a war of civilization against barbarism,” found himself answered by torrential letters that this was Europe’s, and not civilization’s, war. As in the first days of the crisis that was called the crash, citizens divided between those who believed that it would soon be over and those who believed that only ruin and the end of reasoning man lay ahead. No genius was needed to foretell the war’s coming. But no genius was clairvoyant enough to predict its outcome or its end, to guess the magnitude of the struggle or how, eventually, its antagonists would line up; no philosopher was so clear as to say what it would do to the complex of heritages, laws, customs, beliefs and traditions that are known as civilization.

And as, late in October 1929, no man could picture October 1939, no one at the outbreak of war could picture the U. S. ten years hence and see with confidence the conditions of its common life. Off in the unknown future lay a sequence of struggles that would number the prophets and the positive among its casualties. Off in the same future lay the contributions to the productive life to be tested against the forces of destruction. And off in the same future lay the challenge of great ideas to change the mood of the people, to determine where if anywhere, lie the horizons that mark the furthest Azores of the mind and set at last the final limits ending the Pursuit of Happiness.