How Big Is One

THE ATLANTIC

BY EDWARD WEEKS

MY LATE friend, the French writer Raoul de Roussy de Sales, who knew America intimately, used to tease me about our infatuation with bigness. “It’s in your blood,”he would say. “When I listen to Americans talking on shipboard, or in a Paris restaurant, or here in New York, it is only a question of time before someone will come out with that favorite boast of yours — ’the biggest in the world!' The New York skyline, or the Washington Monument, or the Chicago Merchandise Mart — the biggest in the world. You say it without thinking what it means.” How right he was, yet until he prodded me about it, I had never realized that this was indeed our national boast. We take pride in being big, and in a youthful way we used to think that bigness was our own special prerogative. But now we know better; now we find ourselves confronted with nations or with groups of nations which are quite as big as we are and which have the potential of being considerably bigger. This calls for a new orientation; indeed, I think it might be timely if we examine this concept of bigness and try to determine how it has affected our private lives and our thinking.

We have been in love with bigness ever since the adolescence of our democracy. The courtship began on the frontier: the uncut virgin forests, so dense and terrifying; the untamed flooding rivers; the limitless prairies; the almost impassable Sierras — to overcome obstacles like these, man, so puny in comparison, had to outdo himself. He had to be bigger than Hercules. The English live on a small, contained island, and English humor is naturally based on understatement; but an American when he is having fun always exaggerates.

Our first hero of the frontier was a superman. Davy Crockett, who could outshoot, outfight, and outwoo anyone. One day he sauntered into the forest for an airing but forgot to take his thunderbolt along. This made it embarrassing when he came face to face with a panther. The scene is described in the old almanac, as Howard Mumford Jones says, “in metaphoric language which has all the freshness of dawn.”The panther growled and Crockett growled right back — “He grated thunder with his teeth” — and so the battle began. In the end, the panther, tamed, goes home with Davy, lights the fire on a dark night with flashes from his eyes, brushes the hearth every morning with his tail, and rakes the garden with his claws. Davy did the impossible, and listening to the legends of his prowess made it easier for the little guy on the frontier to do the possible.

Davy Crockett had a blood brother in Mike Fink, the giant of the river boatmen, and first cousins in Tony Beaver and Paul Bunyan of the North Woods and Pecos Bill of the Southwest. They were ringtailed roarers, and everything they did had an air of gigantic plausibility. Prunes are a necessary part of the lumberjack’s diet, and Paul Bunyan’s camp had such a zest for prunes that the prune trains which hauled the fruit came in with two engines, one before and one behind pushing. “Paul used to have twenty flunkies sweepin’ the prunestones out from under the tables, but even then they’d get so thick we had to wade through ‘em up over our shoes sometimes on our way in to dinner. They’d be all over the floor and in behind the stove and piled up against the windows where they’d dumped ‘em outside so the cook couldn’t see out at all hardly. . . . In Paul’s camp back there in Wisconsin the prunestones used to get so thick they had to have twenty ox-teams haulin’ ‘em away, and they hauled ‘em out in the woods, and the chipmunks ate ‘em and grew so big the people shot ‘em for tigers.” Only an American could have invented that build-up, and I am grateful to Esther Shephard for having recaptured the legend so accurately in her Paul Bunyan.

Texas, with its fondness for bigness, preferred the living man to the legend: it provided the space for men like Richard King, the founder of the King Ranch. Richard King’s story as told by Tom Lea is Horatio Alger multiplied by a thousand. The son of Irish immigrants, he ran off to sea at the age of eleven; a river boat captain in his twenties, he came ashore, married the parson’s daughter, bought 15,000 acres of desert at two cents an acre, and went into the cattle business. His close friend and adviser was Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee of the Second United States Cavalry, and it was Lee who gave King what has come to be the family slogan: “Buy land; and never sell.” The King Ranch has grown to 700,000 acres in Texas with big offshoots in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Australia, Cuba, and Brazil, and those of us who dwell in cities and suburbia have developed a kind of Mount Vernon reverence for this vast domain. It is just about as big, we think, as a good ranch ought to be.

I ENTERED publishing in the summer of 1923 as a book salesman in New York. As I look back over the thirty-live years of my working life, I recognize that a significant change has taken place in our business community. The motorcars which I used to covet as a young bachelor, the Stutz Bearcat, the Mercer, the Simplex, the Locomobile, the Pierce Arrow — all these beauties and hundreds of the lesser breeds, like the Hupmobile, the Maxwell, the Franklin, the Stanley Steamer, and the Moon — are museum pieces today. The beauty and the originality which went into their design have been melted down and vulgarized in the models of the five major companies which survive.

In the days I am speaking of, Mr. Potts was our family grocer, and he knew the exact cuts of roast beef and lamb which would bring joy to my father’s heart, just as he was prepared for my mother’s remonstrance when there was too much gristle. There used to be a family grocer, like Mr. Potts, in every American community. Then some genius in Memphis, Tennessee, came up with the Piggly-Wiggly, the first gigantic cash and carry where the customer waited on himself, and in no time there were chains of these supermarkets stretching across the country. Such consolidation as this has been going on in every aspect of business, and at a faster and faster tempo.

When I was a book salesman, an American book publisher who sold a million dollars’ worth of his books in one year was doing quite a prosperous business. Today a publisher who sells only a million dollars’ worth of books a year cannot afford to remain in business; he has to join forces with another and larger publisher so that their combined production will carry them over the break-even point.

In the nineteen-twenties almost every American city had two newspapers, and the larger ones had four or five, and there is no doubt that this competition for ideas, for stories, for the truth was a healthy thing for the community. Today most American communities are being served by a single paper.

Of the daily papers that were being published in this country in 1929, 45 per cent have either perished or been consolidated. This consolidation, this process of making big ones out of little ones, is a remorseless thing, and it may be a harmful thing if it tends to regiment our thinking.

We Americans have a remarkable capacity for ambivalence. On the one hand we like to enjoy the benefits of mass production, and on the other we like to assert our individual taste. Ever since the Civil War we have been exercising our genius to build larger and larger combines. Experience has taught us that when these consolidations grow to the size of a giant octopus, we have got to find someone to regulate them. When our railroads achieved almost insufferable power, we devised the Interstate Commerce Commission, and we eventually found in Joseph Eastman a regulator of impeccable integrity who knew as much as any railroad president. We have not had such good luck with our other regulatory agencies, as the recent ignoble record of the FCC makes clear. What troubles me even more than the pliancy of FCC commissioners to political pressure is their willingness to favor the pyramiding under a single ownership of television channels, radio stations, and newspapers. Isn’t this the very monopoly they were supposed to avoid?

The empire builders, who were well on their way to a plutocracy, were brought within bounds by the first Roosevelt. Then under the second Roosevelt it was labor’s turn, and in their bid for power they have raised the challenge of what regulations can be devised which will bring them to a clearer recognition of their national responsibility. In the not far future we can see another huge decision looming up: When atomic energy is harnessed for industrial use, will it be in the hands of a few private corporations or in a consolidation which the government will control? My point is that in the daily exposure to such bigness the individual is made to feel smaller than he used to be, smaller and more helpless than his father and grandfather before him.

I realize, of course, that twice in this century our capacity to arm on an enormous scale has carried us to victory with a speed which neither the Kaiser nor Hitler believed possible. But it is my anxiety that, in a cold war which may last for decades, the maintenance of bigness, which is necessary to cope with the U.S.S.R., may regiment the American spirit.

In his book, Reflections on America, Jacques Maritain, the French philosopher, draws a sharp distinction “between the spirit of the American people and the logic of the superimposed structure or ritual of civilization.” He speaks of “the state of tension, of hidden conflict, between this spirit of the people and this logic of the structure; the steady, latent rebellion of the spirit of the people against the logic of the structure.” Maritain believes that the spirit of the American people is gradually overcoming and breaking the logic of their materialistic civilization. I should like to share his optimism, but first we have some questions to answer, questions about what the pressure of bigness is doing to American integrity and to American taste.

HENRY WALLACE has called this century of the Common Man. Well, the longer I live in it the more I wonder whether we are producing the Uncommon Man in sufficient quantity. No such doubts were entertained a century ago. When Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous address on “The American Scholar” to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard in 1837, he was in a mood of exhilaration, not doubt, and he heralded among other things a change which had taken place in American literature. It was a change in the choice of subject matter; it wras a change in approach, and it showed that we had thrown off the leading strings of Europe. Here is how he described it:

The elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state assumed in literature a very marked and benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. . . . The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign — is it not? — of new vigor when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. . . . This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.

This change from the appreciation of the elite to the appreciation of the commonplace, or as Emerson called it, the vulgar, has been increasingly magnified under the pressure of numbers. But were Emerson able to return to us for a short visit, I am not sure that he would be altogether happy about what we have done to elevate the vulgar in literature or in television.

In contemporary literature, new books — the best we can produce — are still published in hard covers and sold to a discriminating body of readers. If I had to guess, I should say that there are about one million discriminating readers in this country today, and what disturbs me as an editor is that this number has not increased with the population ; it has not increased appreciably since the year 1920. What has increased is the public for comic books, for murder mysteries, for sex and sadism. This debasement, especially in fiction, was most noticeable in the early stages of our paperbacks, when the racks in any drugstore were crowded with lurid, large-bosomed beauties who were being either tortured or pursued. Recently there has been an improvement, both in quantity and in seriousness, thanks to the editors of Anchor Books and the New American Library. thanks also to a feeling of outrage which was expressed in many communities. But it still seems to me regrettable that after a hundred years of public education we have produced such a demand for the lowest common denominator of emotionalism.

Am I, I sometimes wonder, a minority of one when I shudder at certain photographs in our pictorial magazines? The picture of a Negro being lynched; the picture of an airliner which has crashed and burned, with that naked body to the left identified as an opera singer whose voice we have all heard and loved; the picture of a grieving mother whose child has just been crushed in an automobile accident? Am I a minority of one in thinking that these are invasions of privacy, indecent and so shocking that we cringe from the sight?

Television, for which we once had such high hope, is constantly betrayed by the same temptation. It can rise magnificently to the occasion, as when it brought home to us the tragedy in Hungary, yet time and again its sponsored programs sink to a sodden level of brutality, shooting, and torture. And is there any other country in the world which would suffer through such incredible singing commercials as are flung at us? Does the language always have to be butchered for popular appeal, as when we are adjured to “live modern" and “smoke for real”? Am I a minority of one in thinking that the giveaway programs, by capitalizing on ignorance, poverty, and grief, are a disgrace? These are deliberate efforts to reduce a valuable medium to the level of the bobbysoxers.

There was a time when the American automobiles led the world in their beauty, diversity, and power, but the gaudy gondolas of today are an insult to the intelligence. In an era of close crowding when parking is an insoluble problem, it was sheer arrogance on the part of the Detroit designers to produce a car which was longer than the normal garage, so wasteful of gasoline, so laden with useless chromium and fantails that it costs a small fortune to have a rear fender repaired. I saw in a little Volkswagen not long ago a sign in the windshield reading, “Help Stamp out Cadillacs!” There speaks the goodnatured but stubborn resistance of the American spirit against the arrogance of Detroit.

Is it inevitable in mass production that when you cater to the many, something has to give, and what gives is quality? I wonder if this has to be. I wonder if the great majority of the American people do not have more taste than they are credited with. The phenomenal increase in the sale of classical music recordings the moment they became available at mass production prices tells me that Americans will support higher stand - ards when they are given the chance. I stress the aberration of taste in our time because I think it is something that does not have to be. The republic deserves better standards, not only for the elect, but straight across the board.

I wish that our directors of Hollywood, the heads of our great networks, and those who, like the automobile designers in Detroit, are dependent upon American taste — I wish that such arbiters would remember what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a hundred and twenty-five years ago in his great book, Democracy in America. “When the conditions of society are becoming more equal,” said Tocqueville, “and each individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and more insignificant, a habit grows up of ceasing to notice the citizens to consider only the people, and of overlooking individuals to think only of their kind.”

It seems to me that our tastemakers have been guilty of this fallacy ever since the close of World War II. They have ceased to notice the citizens and consider only the people, just as Tocqueville warned. They no longer plan for the differences in individual taste, but think only of people in the mass.

IN THE years that followed the crash of 1929, Americans began to transfer their trust from big business to big government; if big business and banking, so ran the reasoning, could not be trusted to keep us out of depressions, perhaps big government could. Gradually in this emergency we began to shape up our version of the welfare state, a concept which was evolving in many parts of the Western world and to which both Democrats and Republicans are now committed.

A welfare state requires a big government with many bureaus, just as big government in its turn requires big taxes. We embarked on big government with the idea of safeguarding those segments of American society which were most in jeopardy, and now after twenty-five years of experimentation we are beginning to learn that the effects of big government upon the individual are both good and bad. It is good to provide the individual with security, and to give him the chance to adjust his special claims; another and perhaps unsuspected asset has been dramatized by Edwin O’Connor in his novel, The Last Hurrah, in which he showed us how President Roosevelt had diminished and destroyed the sovereignty of the city boss. It is Washington, not Ward Eight, that has the big patronage to give today.

The maleffects of big government are more subtle. Consider, for instance, the debilitating effect of heavy taxation. I remember a revealing talk I had with Samuel Zemurray when he was president of the United Fruit Company. Born in Russia, Zemurray made his start here by pushing a fruit cart through the streets of Gadsden, Alabama. Then he set up his own business as a banana jobber by selling the bunches of bananas the fruit company didn’t want. He sold out to United Fruit and continued to acquire shares until he controlled the majority of the stock. In the autumn of F.D.R.’s second term, when we were sitting in adjoining Pullman seats on the long run to Washington, Mr. Zemurray began talking about the President’s promises to “the forgotten man.” “He made three promises,” Zemurray said, “and he has kept two of them: the promise to labor and that to the farmer. The promise he has not kept is to the little businessman. Under today’s taxes it would be quite impossible for a young man to do as I did — he would never be able to accumulate enough capital.”

Some years after this talk, in 1946 to be exact, I was on a plane flying West from Chicago. It was a Sunday morning and the man who sat beside me at the window seat had the big bulk of the Chicago Tribune spread open on his knees, but out of politeness’ sake he gave me the proverbial greeting, “Hello, where are you from?” And when I said, “From Boston,” his face lit up. “Do they still have good food at the Automat?” he asked. “Boy, that’s where I got my start and it certainly seems a lifetime ago.” And then in a rush out poured his life story in one of those sudden confidences with which Americans turn to one another: How he had become a salesman of bedroom crockery, and how his Boston boss had refused to raise him to thirty dollars a week. In his anger he had switched to the rival company, and under their encouragement he had simply plastered Cape Cod with white washbowls, pitchers, soap dishes, and tooth mugs. “Seven carloads I sold in the first year,” he told me. The company called him back to its head office in Chicago, and then came the crash. The company owned a bank and lake shore real estate, and when the smoke had cleared away and recovery was possible, he found himself running the whole shebang. His wife hadn’t been able to keep up with it all, he said, shaking his head sadly. He had had his first coronary, and what kept him alive today was his hope for his two sons, who had just come out of the Navy. “But, you know,” he said to me, his eyes widening, “they neither of them want to come in with me. They don’t seem to want to take the chances that I took. They want to tie up with a big corporation. I just don’t get it.”

Security for the greatest number is a modern shibboleth, but somebody still has to set the pace and take the risk. And if we gain security, but sacrifice first venture and then initiative, we may find, as the Labor Party in England did, that we end with all too little incentive. As I travel this country since the war, I have the repeated impression that fewer and fewer young men are venturing into business on their own. More and more of them seek the safety of the big corporations. There are compelling reasons for this, the evershrinking margin of operating profit being the most insistent. But if we keep on trading independence and initiative for security, I wonder what kind of American enterprise will be left fifty years from now.

A subtle conditioning of the voter has been taking place during the steady build-up of big government. During the Depression and recovery we took our directives from Washington almost without question; so too during the war, when we were dedicated to a single purpose and when the leadership in Washington in every department was the best the nation could supply. And for almost twenty years local authority and the ability to test our political initiative in the home county and state has dwindled. About the only common rally which is left to us is the annual drive for the community fund. Too few of our ablest young men will stand for local office. Their jobs come first, and they console themselves with the thought that if they succeed they may be called to Washington in maturity. We used to have a spontaneous capacity for rallying; we could be inflamed, and our boiling point was low. Our present state of lethargy, our tendency to let George do it in Washington, is not only regrettable, it is bad for our system.

I remember one of the last talks I had with Wendell Willkie. He was still showing the exhaustion of defeat, and he spoke with concern as he said, “One of the weaknesses in our democracy is our tendency to delegate. During an election year we will work our hearts out, and then when the returns are in, we think we have done our part. For the next three years what happens to the party is the responsibility of the national committeemen. Have you ever looked at them?”

The decision having been made to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, President Truman tells us that he retired and slept soundly. But those in authority in these days are less sure. The delegation of so much authority to those in Washington and the difficulties of dealing with an opponent so ruthless and enigmatic as Russia seem to have developed in our most responsible officials a secretiveness and an uncertainty which make it hard for the citizen to follow. This administration has practiced a policy of nondisclosure toward the press and the electorate which has left the average citizen in a state of constant uncertainty. I have nothing but admiration for the dedication and stamina of Secretary Dulles, but I wish with all my heart that he had made our purpose and our commitments clearer for our allies and for our own people to understand. When we pulled that dam out from under Nasser’s feet, we projected a crisis which must have come as a great shock to France and Britain. And how can we blame the young leaders of Hungary for misunderstanding the words “dynamic liberation" when we at home had no clear notion of what they meant? It was inexcusable not to have warned the American people that the Sputniks were coming and that greater exertions must be expected of us. This is no time for remoteness or for lulling slogans or for the avoidance of hard truths. The volume of material, the thousands of articles dealing with the great issues of today which are pouring into my office from unknown, unestablished writers, testifies to the conscientiousness and the courage of American thinking. The pity of it is that such people have not been taken more fully into the confidence of their own government.

I HAVE said that the concept of bigness has been an American ideal since our earliest times. I pointed to our propensity to build larger and larger combines ever since the Civil War, and how the process of consolidation has speeded up during the past thirty-five years. I suggested that we cannot have the fruits of mass production without suffering the effects of regimentation. And I ask that we look closely at what the pressure of bigness has done to American taste and opinion. Is the individual beginning to lose self-confidence and his independence? In short, how big is one?

Surely, in an atomic age self-reliance and selfrestraint are needed as they have never been before. See with what force Van Wyck Brooks expresses this truth in his Writer’s Notebook:

Unless humanity is intrinsically decent, heaven help the world indeed, for more and more we are going to see man naked. There is no stopping the world’s tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few. The time is coming when there will be nothing to restrain men except what they find in their own bosoms; and what hope is there for us then unless it is true that, freed from fear, men are naturally predisposed to be upright and just?

As we look about us, what evidence can we find that in an atmosphere overshadowed by Russia and made murky by the distrust of McCarthyism there are citizens who will still stand forth, upright and ready to speak the hard truth for the public good? How big is one?

One is as big as George F. Kennan, who believes that we cannot continue to live in this state of frozen belligerency in Europe. We do not have to accept all of his proposals before applauding his thoughtful, audacious effort to break up the ice.

One is as big as Omer Carmichael, the superintendent of schools in Louisville, Kentucky, who led the movement for voluntary integration in his border state; as big as Harry Ashmore, the editor of the Little Rock, Arkansas, Gazette, for his fearless and reasonable coverage of the Faubus scandal.

One is as big as Frank Laubach, who believes in teaching the underdeveloped nations how to read their own languages, and then in supplying them with reading matter which will aid them to develop their farming and health.

One is as big as Linus Pauling, Harold C. Urey, Robert Oppenheimer, and the other editors and sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who have never underestimated Russian scientific capacities, who have always believed in the peaceful value of scientific exchange and never ceased to struggle against fanaticism in secrecy and security.

One is as big as Edith Hamilton, the classicist, the lover of Greece and of moderation; and as Alice Hamilton, her younger sister, who pioneered in the dangerous field of industrial medicine.

One is as big as Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, who for years have been guiding lights in the resistant field of juvenile delinquency.

One is as big as Ralph Bunche and Eleanor Roosevelt.

One is as big as Louis M. Lyons, whose interpretation of the news and whose judgment of the popular press have provided, in the words of the Lauterbach Award, “a conscience for a whole profession.”

One is as big as I. I. Rabi, a brilliant scientist and a passionate humanist, who, on being asked how long it would take us to catch up to Russia and to safeguard our long-range future, replied, “A generation. You know how long it takes to change a cultural pattern. The growing general awareness of this need will help us, but nevertheless we will have to work hard to succeed in a generation.”

One is as big as Frederick May Eliot, president for twenty-one years of the American Unitarian Association, who worked himself to the bone for the deepening of faith and for reconciliation.

One is as big as you yourself can make it.