Centrepiece Myths and realities
Colin Welch
'V very reader of the Spectator knows with what vitality, sense, wit and knowledge Paul Johnson fills a column. Amazing about his History of the Modern World (Weidenfeld, £16.50) is to find the same elan inspiring some 734 pages, in which I have yet to find a dull one. He is described on the dust jacket as a well-known jour- nalist and author. How envious and resent- ful must be many professional historians, bogged down in their narrow specialisa- tions, afraid of saying anything much for fear of getting it wrong, at the spectacle of this rank red-headed outsider surging fearlessly and repeatedly across their jealously guarded little patches, a Sherman through their Georgia, firing off judgments like artillery barrages, using facts lavishly, as Delacroix used paint, to fill with life a vast and coherent canvas!
Some of his most exhilarating pages are devoted to a vigorous rehabilitation of Warren Gamaliel Harding, generally derid- ed as America's worst president. The usual picture is of a man hopelessly commonplace and vulgar, ceaselessly entangled in 'cheap sex episodes' and orgies, engendering il- legitimate children even in a White House coat-cupboard, being swindled by card sharpers, knocking back bootleg whisky, turning the White House into a smoke- filled speakeasy; if not particularly corrupt himself, then surrounded by crooks and base cronies; the hollow front man of a deliberate conspiracy to hand America over to big business, heading an administra- tion responsible for 'more concentrated rascality and robbery' than any other in history.
Turn now to Johnson, and we find a Harding genial, handsome and friendly but dignified, 'decent small-town America in Person', honest and 'exceptionally shrewd' — if not perhaps in the choice of all his subordinates. Yet his cabinet was very distinguished, and the rottenest apple in it, Senator Fall, was confirmed on appoint- ment by immediate and unprecedented ac- clamation: many must have shared Har- ding's illusion. With the Budget Act of 1921, Harding for the first time introduced strict financial control of all departments. As Charles Dawes, first director of the Budget bureau, picturesquely put it, Har- ding 'waved the axe and said that anybody Who didn't co-operate his head would come off'; before that 'everyone did as they damn pleased'. Harding is still the only American president to have brought about massive cuts in government expenditure. As a reward, deep recession turned into economic recovery.
And the orgies, the corrupton, the great conspiracy? So far as Harding is concerned, all apparently fantasy, the squalid part of a 'systematic misrepresentation of public policy over a whole era'. Much was made of Mrs Harding's having allegedly burnt all her husband's papers, an act taken as con- clusive evidence of guilty secrets. But the papers were never burnt at all and, when ex- amined in 1964, `no truth was found in any of the myths'.
If Mr Johnson is right, how then did these myths arise? Why, if unfounded, do they still flourish? I suppose, as Mr Johnson suggests, because they fit in with the world-view of modern intellectuals, to whom all business is obnoxious, big business especially so, corporations are the work of the Devil, all businessmen power- hungry crooks, parasites and exploiters, and all presidents friendly to business, as Harding undoubtedly was, tainted with its evils. If only Harding's reputation were the only, the last or the most important thing gravely damaged by this poisonous and destructive outlook!
politicians assume with Hegel that what is I is right. If certain goods or services are supplied by the state, so they must continue to be. Even the means of supplying them are sacrosanct. All that remains to be discussed is the total amount to be spent. Some say more, some less. Nobody ques- tions the duty of the state to foot the bill.
Mrs Thatcher, so refreshingly original in many ways, is flawed at times by this defect. In her conference speech, for in- stance, she upbraided those who demand more speAding on roads but object to or ig- nore the extra taxation necessary to finance it. A fair point, so it looks, till one reflects that there is no need whatever for all roads, 'I'm very worried, me any more,' nobody gossips about existing or contemplated, to be paid for out of ,taxation. Why not charge tolls, as the French and Italians do, for all motorways? Why not sell off all existing motorways to private enterprise to operate at a profit? Why not delegate all future construction to private enterprise on an ordinary risk basis?
Apart from making and saving money, advantages appear at once. Dangerous overcrowding on the motorways could easi- ly be checked by toll increases. Some of the vast loads which choke them could also be wooed back by the railways. Only those motorways would in future be built which were expected to be profitable, necessary or useful. Road construction would be taken out of politics, removed from the senseless maelstrom of conflicting pressure groups, all unrepresentative and irresponsible, and restored to the rational world of profit and loss. And of course motorways would be paid for by those who actually use them and not, as most unjustly at present, by people too poor to use a car but never too poor to pay taxes.
One piddling objection: that in our small and overcrowded island we need to have far too many motorway entrances and exits. Need to have? Of course we don't. If we have in fact too many, which I doubt, why not close half of them, or more or less? It was not God who decreed that Hungerford must have an exit (my own, as it happens) but only some fallible planner.
Sound economics is often regarded as mean, hostile and frustrating. Yet it can be friendly and helpful, effortlessly disentangl- ing many knots.
Talking still of economics, 1 read with mystified interest a review in the Times by Bryan • Appleyard of Raymond Williams's book, Towards 2000, Mr Ap- pleyard rhapsodised about Williams's at- tempt to 'sustain the drive of a Long Revolution towards a benevolent, free socialism in which production will once again be directed towards use rather than consumption'. What on earth is here meant? I have heard by socialists the distinction made (false as I think it) bet- ween production for use and production for profit. But between 'use' and 'consump- tion'? That is still a new one to me.
In order to extract Mr Appleyard's full meaning, I fancy you have to add all man- ner of extraneous value judgments, pre- judices and flavour-enhancers to the words 'use' and 'consumption' as he uses and con- sumes them. This helps too with other words, like 'wants' and 'needs', often used by socialists. Add a sort of progressive sodium glutamate to them, and you will find that 'wants' are what ordinary people actually want, therefore despicable. 'Needs', by contrast, are what they ought to want, in the view of mandarins like Williams and Appleyard, and therefore ad- mirable. Similarly, objects for 'use' are what nanny thinks good and wholesome, while objects for 'consumption' are naughty.
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