World Diary: 1929-1934
[McBride, $3.00]
THE fact that Mr. Howe has described his book as a diary disarms the reviewer measurably. For, after all, A diary is not so much a record of events as a report of the reactions of its author to these events. Mr. Howe’s volume is far more than a mere diary; indeed, it is one of the clearest and most consistent interpretations of events during the depression period which I have encountered anywhere. It is, moreover, an interpretation which no one can afford to ignore.
Nevertheless, the interpretation is highly personal. Viewing the procession of events with a detachment which his situation as editor of the Living Age permits him, Mr. Howe finds his explanations almost exclusively in high finance and big business rather than in politics. Now it is to be conceded at once that in recent years the political has been overdone and the financial ignored indefensibly; that, of course, is one reason why we have come to our present, circumstances. Granting that, however, it does not seem to me that the picture is quite complete if it confines itself to the material aspects, or even if, as in the present case, it is expanded to include the moral. At the bottom of the European mess Mr. Howe sees France, and for France, in his own mind, he substitutes the Comité des Forges. On the personal side, Tardieu is for him the villain, even Briand’s idealism is at bottom only Gallic calculation. In the same fashion the actions of the politicians of other countries are similarly explained almost exclusively in terms of their financial connections.
The history of the post-depression years is thus reduced not perhaps to the limits of a tale of a single conspiracy, but to the level of conspiracies. To my way of thinking, however, in the case of both events and men, the thing is not quite as simple as Mr. Howe makes it out to be. Looking back over these years, recalling the conferences, the crises, the statesmen I have seen at the moments Mr. Howe is describing, his reports seem to me to lack actuality. They have, if I may say so, the defects as well as the virtues of detachment.
In reality the contemporary politician has been more often exposed as an ostrich than as a vulture. It is the stupidity rather than the cupidity of the captains of industry and finance which has brought them to their present low estate. High finance can survive any public exposure which shows it to be corrupt, but when it is revealed in the hands not of master minds but of dull muddlers, that is another matter.
It is necessary to warn the reader against not a few of Mr. Howe’s premises. For example, his assertion that Mr. Hoover gave M. Laval categorical debt assurances has always been denied by the former and never claimed by the latter. In the same fashion his description of the Austro-German Tariff Union affair in March 1931 suffers because he ignores the political implications of the Reichstag Election of September 1930 and the SnowdenChéron episode at The Hague in January of the same year. By contrast, his analysis of the blunders of Stimson in Manchuria, supplemented as these have now been by similar mistakes at the recent naval conversations in London, deserves to be broadcast to the country.
In sum, Mr. Howe’s volume is rather a challenge than a work of history. Most of his interpretations of men and of events are open to question. There is basis for controversy on every page. Nevertheless no one has told more impressively at least one part of a story the whole of which will not be known to the present generation.
FRANK H. SIMONDS