Yank in Britain

Eric Johnston, free-wheeling President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whirled smoothly and articulately through England as guest of British Government and industry. On what stumps were offered him he first took on the Left, then turned around and lectured the Right. At week's end Eric Johnston was still firmly talking in the middle of the road.

The Left. Mr. Johnston had the advantage of numbers in his debate with Britain's razor-tongued Socialist-Economist Harold Laski. Moderator on last week's University of Chicago Round Table radio program beamed from London was his traveling companion, the University's hustling Vice President William Benton, who is also vice chairman of the liberal-businessman U.S. Committee for Economic Development.

All three agreed high employment must be the first aim of postwar economic policy. But Laski argued for "production for community consumption . . . [planned] by the State." Machinery-Man Johnston and Ex-Advertising-Man Benton plumped for an American ideal: "the initiative of millions which a free economy generates."

Replied Planner Laski (whose remarks were punctuated with phrases like "my poor dear Johnston"): "If you . . . think that private enterprise is going to be so much more beneficial after this war . . . how do you account for the fact that we went from the last war straight into the depression of 1929?" Snapped Enterpriser Johnston: "I am amazed that a man like you would make a statement of that kind. . . . We are finding out in the United States today that there is no such thing as overproduction." When Laski brought up the well-known fact that so-called free enterprise has always been full of restrictive practices, Johnston insisted that the restrictions could & should be removed but that that was no reason to do away with enterprise entirely.

Laski's final barb: "It is marvelous--in a perspiration of passionate excitement Johnston has rediscovered Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, which dates from 1913." But Johnston sneaked in the last word: "It is not Woodrow Wilson who discovered it; it has been the ideal of man since he crawled out of savagery into civilization . . . and you know it."

Four days later Laski, who writes a syndicated column for the Chicago Sun, reported his reactions to Messrs. Johnston & Benton. He was still "bewildered" by their blindness to what he considered the inevitable direction in which the world is moving. "Alongside their outlook," he wrote, "Churchill can really only be described as a left-wing radical."

The Right. Harold Laski would have found Crusader Johnston's lecture to a British Chambers of Commerce luncheon later in the week just as bewildering. Eric Johnston told his hosts: "We ought to put a dead stop to all this palaver . . . about how blood is thicker than water," base U.S.-British relations on the facts about the two nations.

Facts about the U.S., as he saw them:

1) it will never be an "international" nation like Britain, since it is not one nation but "hundreds of separate little empires'';

2) "the average American" is against imperialism of all kinds and loathes international cartels;

3) if British business is smart, it will use the U.S. "boosting quality" to "build up the earning power ... of the world," stop trying to maintain restrictive trade practices.

"The Americans," Johnston concluded, ". . . do not intend to revise their [economic methods]." When reporters asked him how cartel-minded Britishers reacted to his plain talk, he blandly admitted "They think I'm crazy. . . . They asked me whether we would let General Motors fail and when I said yes, they couldn't believe it."

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