AMERICA TODAY : I. PEACEFUL CHANGE
By M. ,I. BONN
[This is the first of three articles by Professor Moritz Bonn, who has just returned from the United States. Next week's article is on " The Making of a State."] Change." • The great economic depression which ruined hundred, thousands of farmers, which threw millions of unem- ployed on the pavement, which deprived other millions of retired farmers and business men of their life-time savings and threatened millions of workers with reduction of wages or dismissal, provided ample material for a violent social upheaval in the U.S.A. RefOrmers as well as demagogues were busily fanning the flame. Upton Sinclair, a high-minded idealist, ran—almost suc- cessfully—for Governor of California on a platform to" end poverty in California "—" E.P.I.C." Dr. Townshend, per- sonally a well-meaning man, offered pensions of two hundred dollars a month to all over sixty years of age. Huey Long's " Share-the-Wealth " campaign opened a kind of middle-class Socialist heaven to the poor whites of the South, the bright colours of which contrasted alluringly with the somewhat pale hues of pre-Raphaelite Communism, with which the lesser lights of the grievously underpaid American intelligentsia attempted to snuff out American capitalism. And Father Coughlin clothed the crude " cheap-money " theories and the " anti-other- people's-property " doctrines which despairing American farmers and broken small business-men have always embraced in periods of depression, with some sort of clerical saintliness, and established pleasant contacts with the big-business silver demagogy' of some mountain States, enjoying at the same time a profitable little silver gamble for his impoverished church. Things looked ugly when an agricultural labour strike ruined a crop and made the farmers see red, or when Communist and Fascist propagandists vied with each other in explain- ing the General Strike on the Pacific Coast as the prelude to the great proletarian revolution.
Elizabeth filling, a self-appointed saviour of Society, compiled—not to say composed—a guide to social safety, The Red Network, a "Who's Who and Handbook of Radical- ism for Patriots." It branded all liberals, pacifists and reformers as "reds," including the President's wife and William Allen White, the chief sponsor, if not the dis- coverer, of Governor Landon, the Republican candidate for the Presidency. But she did not mention Father Coughlin, Huey Long or Di. Townshend, who must not be hampered, as they might draW votes away from the President.
These radicals, who wanted farms, pensions, jobs and safe investments, certainly were not• Communists, nor even Socialists ; at the worst they were a middle-class rabble ; but they had no bourgeois squeamishness about getting what they wanted. If peaceful, means were of no avail they were quite willing to whip out their guns.. The American mind may be long suffering and legalistic ; the American temper is impatient and lawless. American Radicalism is an attitude, not a programme. At the height of the depression the white employees of a big railroad company demanded the dismissal of all coloured men on the pay-roll. A bargain was struck that no sucht dismissals were to take place, but all future vacancies were to be filled with white men ; not long afterwards six coloured employees were murdered. Manifestations of this sort of " rugged American individualism " arc fortunately rare.
The doctrine of " Peaceful Change," the great contribu- tion of nineteenth-century England to the cause of human progress, is embodied in the American Constitution ; it is not, as the Civil War has shown plainly enough, an integral part of American political proceedings. The President, who knows the temperament of his fellow- citizens, has deliberately accepted it and led these unruly masses on the road to reform. His particular measures have not always been very wise ; to have eliminated violence from social development is the height of wisdom, and in social relations Americans have never before re- nounced it deliberately. Their strikes and labour troubles frequently look like test cases, offered as proof of the inevitability of physical class-warfare. The achievements of the " king of strike-breakers," Pearl Bcrghof, would have landed him in gaol in this country, whilst in the United States he has become a kind of film hero, who enjoyed the confidence of great captains of industry. The New Deal has imposed a strong legal curb on these tendencies to violent self-help ; it is forcing both parties to conciliation and compromise. America is slowly learning, what England had learnt long ago, that social warfare must be conducted by peaceful methods. The present labour troubles in the United States revolve round the recognition of trade unions and collective bargaining—an issue settled in this country a hundred years ago.
American reactionaries call the President a Fascist, and compare him, not always favourably, to European dic- tators. He has inaugurated his policy of " Peaceful Change" under an emergency interpretation of the Consti- tution, which enlarged his powers enormously. It did not diminish his responsibilities, nor did it eliminate the Consti- tution. No • popular regime can face a momentous crisis without some sort of emergency legislation. Whether its purpose is achieved directly by widening the powers of the executive or indirectly by eliminating opposition through the formation of a coalition government is immaterial. No revolutionary change is implied in the orderly passing of temporary measures, which lapse when the crisis is over.
Some of the President's hotspur advisers desired to perpetuate these emergency powers after the crisis had passed and use them for far-reaching constitutional changes. Something of this sort has happened in this country, where a coalition form of government has been maintained after the crisis was over and when a onc- party majority was available. The so-called American "Dictatorship" has gone ; the Constitution is functioning again ; but the temporary widening of the Executive's powers has enabled the President to stem a revolution, which had neither Programme nor positive aim, but which would have prevented the peaceful advent of a new order.
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