Battle of Booklets

Between January, when the seeds of ambition are sown, and November, when the political harvest is reaped, September is the season when books & pamphlets flower most profusely in the ripening campaign. Some of the brightest tares blossoming in this year's fields:

Uncommon Sense (National Home Library, 25^) is by Engineer David Cushman Coyle who designed Washington's State Capitol and has done time as a technical adviser to PWA. Some months ago he wrote a booklet called Brass Tacks explaining the whole economic system as he saw it, a work that is supposed to be a favorite with Franklin Roosevelt. This summer he went to an island in Maine, settled down with Brain Trusters Thomas Corcoran and Benjamin Cohen as his neighbors, began to produce a nontechnical version of Brass Tacks.

Chapter by chapter and sentence by sentence Author Coyle tried his composition out on a Maine fisherman and the fisherman's wife. Result: Uncommon Sense. Further result: 50,000 copies have been ordered by the Democratic National Committee. Theme of Uncommon Sense: "Saving for a rainy day only makes it rain." With lucid plausibility David Cushman Coyle expounds technological unemployment, the arrival of an economy of plenty, the advantages of economic nationalism, the congenital wickedness of high finance. The blame for Depression he places on men who invest part of their income instead of spending it. His solution is high income taxes to take away from the rich the money they invest, and Government spending to distribute it among the poor who will not save it. Potentiality: 100,000 votes for Roosevelt.

Waste (Bobbs-Merrill, 50-c-) by the same author is an engineer's popularization of the problems of soil erosion, drought, deforestation, soil fertility, etc. Towards the end Waste marches on into a New Deal view of unemployment and relief. Potentiality: 25,000 votes for Roosevelt.

The Long Road (National Home Library, 25-c-) is written by Arthur E. Morgan rather as the onetime head of Antioch College than as the chairman of Tennessee Valley Authority. Believing that business has abused its powers, that the reliability of public ownership is unjustly disparaged, he does not damn big business indiscriminately. Says he: "As I worked along through the years, over and over again I found that in practical affairs the ethics of big businessmen were better than the ethics of small businessmen. . . . The difficulty then is . . . that defects of character which in a simple society may be endurable as common weaknesses of human nature, may threaten to wreck the structure of our society when they are magnified to the dimensions of nationwide industries or of continent-wide governments."

His conclusion: "If personal character is on a low level, then there comes a time when no refinement of social planning and no expenditure of public wealth, however great, will create a good social order. . . . In my opinion life in America is approaching that point."

In short Arthur Morgan's campaign is his own, for a higher standard of ethics, public & private.

Potentiality: 10,000 votes for Roosevelt, 5,000 votes for Landon.

Neither Purse Nor Sword or the Menace to the Union (Macmillan, $2) was nearly finished when Pennsylvania's onetime Representative James Montgomery ("The Constitution") Beck died. Upon his death it was finished by Merle Thorpe, editor of The Nation's Bttsiness. Its opening sentence: "It is an interesting coincidence that at the very time when Edward Gibbon was approaching the completion of his monumental work--the 'mighty epitaph' of the greatest republic of ancient times--a small group of men assembled in Philadelphia were creating a new republic in the western world which, in point of potential power. . . ." The remainder of the volume's 205 pages is devoted to a learned account of how the Constitution has been progressively undermined, a thesis dear to those who like it, hateful to those who do not.

Potentiality: 100 votes for Landon, 1,000 votes for Roosevelt.

I'm For Roosevelt (Reynal & Hitchcock, $1) was written by Joseph P. Kennedy, close Roosevelt friend and onetime SEChairman, to explain why he, a man of wealth and business, finds the New Deal good. The Kennedy argument: i) the public debt the New Deal has piled up is outbalanced by economic gains it has produced; 2) its economic legislation, with the exception of the undivided earnings tax, is beneficial to industry; 3) it has brought U. S. democracy safely through the passage between the Scylla of Fascism and the Charybdis of Revolution.

Potentiality: not over 5,000 votes for Roosevelt since most businessmen have long ago made up their minds.

What It's All About (Macmillan, $1.25) by William Allen White carries this foreword: ''The Republican National Committee has no idea this book is being written. Governor Landon has no idea this book is contemplated; neither has any friend of his." Although made up in good part from articles Emporia's White has written for the Press, including his piece on Landon for the Saturday Evening Post, What It's All About is the ablest piece of political pamphleteering yet evoked by the campaign.

Notable if not definitive is Editor White's account of how a group of Kansas editors and oilmen who had grown up together ran Alf Landon's pre-convention campaign which began "all hilarious and haphazard, all country town stuff . . . an amiable, neighborly, good-natured Kansas mutual admiration society, with ribald but affectionate swipes at the old 'Budget Balancer.' " It ended at Cleveland when the same group "managed to stumble through, and, by looking wise, seemed to be dominating the situation, which was controlled largely by guess and by grab, and, by good dumb luck, the situation always unfolded hours ahead of them." The Republican platform was shaped with Editor White representing Kansas on the Resolutions Committee. When the platform was finished he thanked his fellow members, and, not having talked to the Governor in six hours, promised that Landon would accept it. Ten minutes later, as the platform was about to be read to the Convention, White saw Landon's telegram amending three planks.

Notable, too, is Editor White's intellectual candor: "The temperamental contrast of the parties indicates that Roosevelt is leading his star-eyed cherubim panting into their millennium, while Landon, occasionally jabbing an elbow in the ribs of the Union League boys and with a come-hither grin for agriculture and industry, is content to go inching along to the Republican promised land. . . . Both conventions were similar, indeed all political conventions are like some vast Indian powwow, a ghost dance making mystic political medicine. ... It is the only voodoo we have in this country--tom-toms, brass cymbals, horns, raucous mechanical noises, yawping howling men, screeching hysterical women, savage dancing, waving banners and oratory. . . ." Of President Roosevelt's acceptance speech immediately following the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, Author White says:

"The second part of his speech--and the most powerful in emotional content--is a really gorgeous exhortation. It is filled with quotable sentences. The next edition of Bartlett's book of quotations may have several lines from this Philadelphia speech. As for instance, This generation has a rendezvous with destiny or Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

"It's not true but sounds noble. . . .

"And now I come back to reality, to American life. It is the same in a great city as it is on the farm, the daily routine whether in an office, in a tall building or plowing a 40-acre field, fighting chinch bugs or grasshoppers, or going down in a mine to get ore, standing at a loom, sweating at a forge, or working in a forest. All these are real. No falsetto here. No emotional stuff--but hard reality. . . . Landon has always touched reality. He has always faced life at first hand. He is no theorist, and the Lord be praised, he is no orator.

"In politics more calamitous blunders have been made by the theory that an orator is a statesman than for any other reason. The oratorical type Is the emotional type, expansive, a quick promiser who can diagnose evils and cannot prescribe for them, and of course rarely cures them. The orator has fooled people as an executive ever since the ballot box was invented."

In justification of his choice of Landon over Roosevelt, the aging boss of the Emporia Gazette explains this philosophy: "Economic thinking moves like molasses in January. Sometimes revolutionary action is swift and fluid and brings economic change with breath-taking rapidity.

"But the gain is only seeming. Slowly social forces resume their course. Reaction gains power. Reason steps in. Emotions rest. . . . Within a decade or a generation, social progress is about to where it would have been under normal process of growth. . . ."

Potentiality: 150,000 votes for Landon.

Half Way with Roosevelt (Viking Press, $2.50) by Ernest K. Lindley begins: "This book is based on the supposition that many people are becoming tired of extravagant language in politics." It ends: "Everybody knows that, if this country conserves its resources, it can produce enough to provide everybody with a decent standard of living. . . . Mr. Roosevelt has moved a little distance forward. . . ." First for the late arch-Democratic New York World, since then for the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune, Author Lindley covered Franklin Roosevelt for seven years, became one of the President's favorite White House correspondents. In Half Way With Roosevelt he presents a cool, critical but sympathetic history of the New Deal which is more likely to steady waverers than to make converts.

Potentiality: 5,000 votes for Roosevelt; 2,500 votes for Landon.

After the New Deal, What? (Macmillan, $2) by Norman Thomas. To modern economic sinners the Socialist Presidential nominee, a onetime Presbyterian parson, preaches a purgatory of Fascism, a paradise of Socialism. Voters who agree with his rational analysis of current confusions may be less easily convinced than in 1932 that the Socialist ticket offers the best way out.

Potentiality: 1,000 votes for Thomas; 2,000 votes for Landon; 3,000 votes for Roosevelt. Best selling pamphlets of the earlier stages of the campaign, still going strong on the book stalls when the foregoing titles joined them last week, include:

Hell Bent for Election and Still Hell Bent, by James P. Warburg, who expounds the reasons why Franklin Roosevelt's onetime Treasury adviser feels that the New Deal has gone off the track.

Guilty, by "Anonymous," with a foreword by Donald Richberg, giving reasons why the New Deal is an essential antidote to the poisons of entrenched greed.

Whose Constitution?, by Henry A. Wallace, in which the Secretary of Agriculture explains why he thinks that that document must mean that the New Deal is entitled to do what its philosophy calls for.

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