Defense of Democracy

Men Must Act, by Lewis Mumford (Harcourt, Brace, $3.00), and Union Now, by Clarence K. Streit (Harpers $3.00), are both books about the ‘crisis of western civilization’ in the face of Fascism and the War threat. What distinguishes them is that their authors have the courage — others will say the temerity — to offer their own solutions, for immediate application. Both books are polemical but not partisan. They fall into that genre of political writing which has its genesis in the pamphleteering of the eighteenth century, when Jefferson, Adams, and Paine were explaining and defending the Republican form of government. Both authors affirm a passionate belief in democracy, and both seek a formula for interpretation and survival in modern terms. The argument in both books was begun before Munich, finished afterward. Each in its own way takes occasion to stress the enhanced urgency of its thesis from the prevailing forces of the post-Munich world.

Mr. Mumford’s conclusion is sharply expressed: ‘We still have a fighting chance to preserve our Western World against Fascist barbarism, but only on one condition — that we are prepared to fight.”The author’s analysis of Fascism, both as America’s enemy and as a destroyer of civilization, and his militant suggestion that the United States immediately break off diplomatic and commercial relations with Italy, Germany, and Japan, were briefly set forth under the title, ‘A Call to Arms!’ and published in the New Republic some months ago. Now in book form the thesis is expanded, and to it is added a suggestive diagnosis of the strength and weakness of American democracy.

Plenty of believers in democracy, including the editors of the New Republic, assailed Mr. Mumford’s ‘Call to Arms’ as incitation to war — not to mention revival of the German Beast myth — and as an efficient aid toward replacing what democratic and civil rights we manage to retain in the United States by a totalitarian war machine. Mr. Mumford attempts to answer his critics: specifying that the United States must not fight the war in alliance with a Tory Imperialist. England, but only when the Chamberlain administration is overthrown; announcing his passionate opposition to conscription in America, and giving his blueprint of what a democratic American army really out to preserve democracy from Fascism would be like. Mr. M umford now comes to grips with the central question of how to fight a war for democracy and not lose what you’re fighting for, but the book in this reviewer’s opinion - does not resolve the dilemma.

If Mr. Mumford is scorching hi his analysis of Fascism, and in his denunciation of all varieties of appeasers, pacifists, isolationists, and ‘ desolationists,’ Mr. Streit’s thesis requires and elicits a different style and emphasis. There is almost no eloquent invective, but a lot of enthusiasm to enlighten his argument. The thesis is simple enough, and is fully stated in the first chapter. The remaining three hundred pages are given to elaboration, and to meeting objections of all comers. To preserve the democratic way of life in the face of that enlarging portion of the planet under a dictatorship, let the democracies unite, not in military alliance or a League of Nations, but in a bona fide political union, precisely as did the thirteen original states in North America. Mr. Streit spent a great many years in Geneva and imbibed a profound appreciation of the weakness of leagues. But he argues that most of them would disappear if the union principle prevailed as against, the league principle.

The thesis becomes decidedly more plausible, when considered in the light of American experience and of the balance of military and economic forces in the modern world, than when first stated in bold and utopian simplicity. The Union would start with the so-called democratic nations, and Mr, Streit names 15: the American Union, the British Commonwealth (specifically the United Kingdom, the Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Ireland), the French Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Swiss Confederation, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. He proposes a common union government — comparable to that of the United States — based upon the peoples in these countries, for the purpose of domestic trade, a common monetary system, and defense. What about colonies, tariffs, nationalism? These are the ‘objections’ and ‘difficulties’ which are the theme of 300 closely reasoned pages of stimulating inquiry.

Mr. Streit on the last page asks all his readers to pick flaws in his argument, and in reply this reviewer would request that he write a second volume, half as good, indicating how the trend toward imperialist rule and strategy and toward a centralized dictatorship of national economics — against which the Union is supposedly a defense — is to be prevented from growing within the ‘states’ of the Union. Or maybe that’s too much to ask. Mr. Streit makes another pertinent request on the last page of his book. He says: I ask you not merely to make known any error you can find in this book, but to try yourself to solve the problem that it leaves.
C. R. WALKER

FIRST novels are a breathless sort of blind man’s huff for till concerned. The author, torn between pride and anguish, alternately wishes he had spent more time on Chapter 12 and on the other hand hopes that all the people who told him he would never pull it off will ask for autographs which he will he able coldly to refuse them. The publisher swings a jittery circle from knowing he will never get his advance back to being sure this is the literary discovery of the decade. (The reviewer, aware that a hook’s destiny depends on readers, not on reviews, yet prays he may not damn a Hemingway.

Our Lives Have Just Begun, by Henry Meyers (Stokes, $2.50), tells the tale of that wildest and saddest of hysterias, the Children’s Crusade in the thirteenth century. A little mused by pageantry, the prose has a verse-like quality, best when it touches the poor little Stephen of Cloves, least successful in its moments of over-cultivated irony. That the end of the story, swerving from historic fact, shows the Caliph surrendering to the dying child and Adam Brousson, the troubadour, moved to agony by the children’s heartbreaking belief, may be taken as some sort of allegorical comment on our own times. In children need not go out to seek death by the sword; it drops on them from the skies above their homes.

Completely different in time and technique is Wind without Rain, by Herbert Krause (BobbsMerrill, $2.50). Set in the grimmest of post-war Minnesota farms, it presents a musician in embryo. For this boy, who wants to play the fiddle, frustration is inherent in life itself, and made more bitter by the fact that he is the cause of the accidental crippling of his brother, Jeppy. It is Jeppy who tells the story. Poverty, the father’s brutality, make life hard beyond sense or hope, and in the end there tails on all the characters the stoic lethargy which the mother had learned long ago. It is a story you have read before. But, because Mr. Krause doesn’t know that, it is fresh and strong. He knows what he wants to say, and why, and how, and only occasionally lets himself get a trifle literary.

In Night Rider, by Robert Penn Warren (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50). American novelists find their ranks increased by one very fine talent indeed. Mr. Warren is the sixth winner of a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, an editor of the Southern Review, a professor of English at Louisiana State, and congratulations are due all around. The story concerns itself with Kentucky’s Tobacco War in 1905, with the ordeal of young Perse Munn, who, the ink scarcely dry on his lawyer’s diploma, finds himself plunged in the affairs of the Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco. The pound of hoofs on sandy roads, the Hare of sudden fires, the betrayal of loyalties, the dim and passionate workings of small minds, confuse Mr. Minin’s idealism, and in the end destroy Mr. Munn himself. There is not a page of the book which does not move. The most casual character, seen once at a meeting, in a dark cabin, on a wagon seat, is alive. This is a hard, compassionate, mature book, packed with event and emotion. Night Rider is regional, historical, agrarian, and far and away the most distinguished novel of the three. It would be sheer impertinence to believe that Mr. Warren’s writing field is regional or partisan. He concerns himself with people, and, whatever he writes, they will dominate Their landscape, existing, fully realized, in the reader’s mind.

FRANCES WOODWARD