In What Direction?

MEN IN MOTION--Henry J. Taylor--Doubleday, Doran ($3).

Henry Taylor is a successful business man (pulp and paper), a newspaperman (correspondent in North Africa), an author (Time Runs Out; TIME, May 11, 1942), an individualist, the offspring of Ohio pioneers, and an ardent disliker of much in contemporary U.S. life. In his autobiographical Men in Motion these qualities are abundantly manifest. An uneven, unprofessional book, packed with good stories (though his fellow correspondents dispute their novelty) and with vehement personal opinions, it is well worth reading for its picture of the mood of the people from whom Taylor and many another American springs.

No Labels. Taylor is fed up with collectivism in all its forms. He believes that in 1932 the depression was all but conquered and "we were on our way up" when the New Dealers stepped on the prepared ground and planted the Europeanized seeds of reactionary bureaucracy. They substituted "an unplanned economy for the virility of self-faith and manly enterprise." The results of their thinking, says Taylor, are apparent in the present plight of the U.S. and the world. "History,'' says Taylor, "will never forgive them. ... I have refrained ever since from saying I am a liberal. I answer that I am an American."

Contemporaries. The scenes in Men in Motion range from Air Chief Marshal Tedder's garden in Cairo to Nazi Hans Dieckhoff's quarters in the German Foreign Office in Berlin. (Said Dieckhoff, the last Nazi Ambassador to the U.S., "Russia opposes Germany's destiny." Said Taylor, "Who doesn't?") They include an interview with Sir Robert Alexander Watson Watt, developer of radar. "Forget the impossible," Watt said. "Few things are impossible." They include a vivid picture of Woodrow Wilson shortly before his death, when young Henry and his father visited the stricken ex-President. "He was not feeble. Often his right arm struck the air in a weird and menacing gesture, then struck again and again as though he would be done with his enemies forever. . . . I want some scalps,' he said to Father time after time, 'and when I am well I am going to get them.' "

Ancestral Portraits. America, says Taylor, is now in spiritual liquidation. When Taylor's great-great-grandfather Robert Taylor built the first house in Columbus, Ohio, enterprise was not some thing people argued about. They had it, or they didn't. Robert Taylor had it. His wife Mehitabel and their children -- five of the eleven were less than twelve years old -- followed him by wagon. Mehitabel drove the wagon. Before she left New York she made the maiden trip up the Hudson on Fulton's Clermont. When she reached the Ohio wilderness the first thing she told Robert was of the wonders of the first commercial steamboat.

Businessman's Beliefs. Along with Henry Taylor's dislike of theories which do not take that confident spirit of his ancestors into account is his sharp warning against vague postwar plans. Far from using Walter Lippmann's language, he nevertheless repeats Lippmann's arguments against unlimited international commitments that are not backed up by the power to make them effective. "We are in no position to lift the standard of living in China, in Russia, among 400,000,000 impoverished people on the overpopulated peninsula of Europe. . . . The whole conception of ... infusing the Four Freedoms is ... sheer political buncombe. . . . We should put a limit on our total postwar aid, both in time and in dollars . . . postwar aid should be restricted to whatever nations took certain elementary steps in their own behalf." But underlying these specific proposals, and others less widely believed, there is the deeper need for a permanent and sustaining answer to the New Deal and to contemporary living: a Christian revival.

Few readers will agree with Author Taylor, many of them will disagree with lim violently. But his book lives up to its title in its picture of men in motion going fast, certainly going somewhere and -- for the most part, in Henry Taylor's belief --going in the right direction.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.