Two American Extremes
AFTER an interval devoted to the frankest kind of autobio- graphy the author of An American Tragedy turns to social criticism by the method of railing accusation. There are no dissidents in any country to-day quite so fierce as the American assailants of the United States, and Mr. Dreiser surpasses them all in ferocity. By comparison with him Mr. Mencken is an agreeable mentor and Mr. Upton Sinclair almost a eulogist of God's country. Tragic America is a piled-up indictment of the plutocratic empire—that amazing growth which, during the forty years or so since the creation of the first " billion-dollar trust " has governed America by making play with all the forms of political democracy. Nothing could be more absurd than to expect from Mr. Dreiser any echo of that " American dream " so eloquently expounded by recent historians of trans-Atlantic civilization. He sees the money power used by its unscrupulous masters for the destruction of the country's natural resources and, through every department of the public life, for the ruin of the American people. Wealth, he declares, has made the laws and abused them ; torn up the Constitution and corrupted the Courts ; established the rule of force in every great industry ; crushed the workers and put them under the most abominable police system of the modern world ; bought the Church, enslaved the colleges, perverted the schools ; poisoned philanthropy and, while encouraging the nation's political leaders to talk of " rugged individualism," made an end of the individual and his simplest rights. Mr. Dreiser does not by any means confine himself to general invective. He has taken pains over his material, has searched the records and collected a horrifying mass of detail by means of which he enforces his charges against the financial and industrial bosses, the mine-owners and railroad magnates, the judges and police. It will be observed that he chooses an order of villains entirely different from those who adorn the pages of other current exposures of American city life. He is not interested in the beer baron, the gang leader and the racketeer. Such public enemies are for him merely the by- products of a system which, being based upon exploitation and the profit motive, are irredeemable. Mr. Dreiser has been to Soviet Russia, and although he does not expect the United States to take the Moscow road, he sees no alternative to revolution. His power of statement and attack is undeniable, and so is his righteous indignation. But his blackness is over- done ; the method defeats the aim. And with every book Mr. Dreiser turns out he displays fresh tricks of his curiously raw and ungainly style.
The distance between Theodore Dreiser of Indiana and Edward A. Filene of Boston is not capable of measurement. Mr. Filene is a business man of an unusual kind. He was a pioneer in department store management, and he has made use of his inventive faculty in many fields of social effort. And now, with the aid of a skilful collaborator, Mr. Charles W. Wood, he states the case for mass production in terms that would have sounded romantic five years ago, and, coming as they do in the midst of the great depression, must seem to
American readers like the wildest fantasy. Mass production, says Mr. Filene, having been discovered cannot be abandoned,
and to suppose. that the triumph of the machine compels a mechanization of life is to adopt a mischievous superstition. Henry Ford is a supreme benefactor of the age, for he grasped not only the full significance of the machine, but also the central fact of wages and consumption. He saw that he could not sell more cars than the public could buy. Hence mass pro- duction is and must be production for the mass. Sooner or later business men are certain to learn that business is completely dependent upon the mass-consumer's dollar. All waste comes out of that dollar, including especially the waste of unemployment, and the enormous waste of retailing through which an article costs three or four times as much to sell as to make. By mass production alone can waste be eliminated. And, moreover, says Mr. Filene, it demands an educated populaca ; it cannot endure mass poverty. It implies a wealth-creating mechanism, producing and dis- tributing. In short, we have here " the way of human libera- tion—that is the great meaning of these wonderful times." Mr. Filene doubtless worked out his stimulating argument before the dusk of the machine and the revelation of the curse of plenty. But the terrific experience of the American people since 1929 has not led him to change his view. His paean is sounded at a moment when mass production (of the palaeo- technic age, it is true) lies in utter discredit, and the next stretch of the way of liberation is lost to the view. That is unlucky for the prophet of successful living in the neo-technic age ; but who will say that the nation which first adventured in mass production is doomed to be beaten by it ?
S. K. RATCLIFFE.
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