Wanted

Civil war in the U.S. within a decade after the peace, and the loss of freedom on the North American continent seem serious possibilities to Harvard's shrewd, studious President James Bryant Conant. Last week, in an article in the May Atlantic Monthly entitled "Wanted: American Radicals," he proposed some preventives.

War at Home. The postwar problems we shall have to face, says Dr. Conant, do not derive merely from a global war. The war itself was a manifestation of a larger maladjustment which afflicted American society before the war and will continue to do so after it. This maladjustment results from two fundamental and unresolved difficulties: 1) the relation of management and labor; 2) the control and ownership of the tools of production. Unless these grave problems are solved in the spirit of what he calls "American radicalism," he believes the U.S. will be embroiled in civil war at home, unable to fulfill any but an irresolute role internationally.

The Names of Ideas. "Liberals" and "conservatives," says Conant, have disappeared from the public scene; in fact, their very names have become meaningless. Their place has been taken by "reactionaries"--to give a name to those who would try to return to a condition approximating a prewar or "earlier status"--and by "radicals," who look forward to a radically different society. The former he calls--"with due apologies"--American reactionaries; the latter, European radicals, in that their ideas have been transplanted and are not indigenous. If the American future is to emerge from the conflict of only these two groups, he "fears greatly for the cause of freedom on this continent."

The Prophets. Conant desires the reappearance of the American radical--of the successor to the men who abolished primogeniture at the founding of the Republic, who "with zest destroyed the Bank of the United States in the times of Andrew Jackson." Such a man will "spring from the American soil," will be firm in the belief that "every man is as good as his neighbor, if not better"; will support "the ideas of Jefferson as against the more aristocratic and monarchical conceptions drawn from Europe"; and will have for his prophets not Marx, Engels and Lenin (to whom he will be respectful) but Thoreau and Emerson; and for his poet, Whitman.

This American radical, confronting the dangers which will threaten his country after the war, will be "a fanatic believer in equality." Though he will be willing, in times of peace, to let salaries and earnings exceed $25,000 a year (for he believes in equality of opportunity, not of rewards), he will endeavor to prevent the growth of a caste system by demanding really effective inheritance and gift taxes and the breaking up of trust funds and estates. Once every generation, in effect, wealth would thus be redistributed. This, Dr. Conant warned, "cannot be lightly pushed aside, for it is the kernel of his philosophy."

This American radical will be generally against Statism; he will favor greater decentralization of governmental authority, though he will "be ready to invoke even the Federal Government in the interests of maintaining real freedom among the masses of the population." But he will want to strengthen local government in order to prevent his old enemy, the Federal power, from increasing every decade. To this end he would even work for a reduction in the number of States so that "new areas, fewer in number and more nearly equal in population" might constitute stronger units of local government.

Demobilization of our armed forces, which is a thought full of alarm to many thinkers, will offer to the American radical, says Dr. Conant, a God-given opportunity to "reintroduce the American concept of a fluid society." Handled properly, a healthy body politic will be assured for at least a generation; handled improperly, "we may well sow the seeds of a civil war within a decade."

He believes that to handle it properly involves this: setting up Federally financed but State-operated machinery for retraining the veterans and placing them in jobs, plus possibly agencies to lend money to groups of competent veterans who might start small retail or manufacturing businesses. Should the veterans feel they were replaced "in civilian life on the basis of the accidents of geography or birth, there will be many who will become frustrated and embittered--particularly if the general level of prosperity should fall," and we should have departed further from the American ideal and abetted a caste society which "is one of potential danger of eruption, danger for the liberty of all."

Demobilization will be the hour of our greatest crisis, the hour for the greatest service of the American radical, whose voice, Dr. Conant admits with regret, he does not yet hear.

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