men, wise and experienced in negotiations. A group of employers followed
them. It was defeat. There was nothing for the President to do but
disband the Conference. He did ask, however, that the public group of
some twenty-five carry on. Now this group included a number of
extraordinarily able men. From them had come some of the wisest and
broadest suggestions that had been placed before the Conference. They
could have presented an impressive program, but they had been
outmaneuvered. They lost heart; they refused to go on. The only remarks
I made at that Conference, bewildered as I had been by the political
maneuvering, were when I saw the public group prepared for the cowardly
business of denying the President’s request. “Let us stick to it, do our
best, make some report,” I pleaded.
But I do not think anybody heard me. I had an impression as I talked
that most of them were calculating when they could get a train to New
York.
My next adventure in Government service came two years later as a member
of President Harding’s Unemployment Conference. The country had been
caught in the first great postwar depression, and nobody was ready for
it. Nobody knew, indeed, how widespread the unemployment was. Mr.
Harding called a conference to deal with the problem without attempting
to find out. The result was that on one hand you had an opposition
belittling the numbers, on the other hand you had the responsible
sponsors of the Conference probably exaggerating them. Nobody knew. And
how easy it would have been to find out, by the same method the country
had used in the War when, by a cooperative effort, the number of
draftable men was counted in twenty-four hours at a limited expense!
This was an impressive Conference because of the make-up, and it was a
mighty well conducted Conference: the chairman, Secretary of Commerce
Hoover, kept it in hand from the start—and this in spite of the fact
that there were all the elements of conflict found in the Industrial
Conference and some extra, for here we had rivalry between the labor
groups themselves, particularly that thorny problem of trade
jurisdiction. But Mr. Hoover was enormously skillful, and we came out
with a program which, if it had been carried out with the machinery
which the Conference devised, would have brought the country to 1929 in
a very different state of preparedness.
After our dismissal I put together in a lecture what I conceived to be
the practical conclusion of the Conference. As my text I used one of the
first principles laid down, “The time to act is before a crisis becomes
inevitable.” This text was an official and authoritative recognition of
the unpalatable fact that business always moves in cycles—that a boom
will be followed by a slump, that common sense demands preparedness.
How prepare? The Federal Government, state, county, community down to
the smallest, was to have in reserve plans and money for work it wanted
done that was not absolutely essential at the moment. When a slump
started, this reserve was to be called out.
Private industry was by no means let off. In good times it was to lay up
a surplus with which to keep plants and laboratory alive and ready for
action as soon as there was a return of orders. The employee was to be
protected by employment insurance. The individual householder was to
keep back certain needed repairs and improvements for the day of need.
That is, everybody was to be ready with his life preserver.
For two years I talked with the conviction of one who has a scheme he
believes sound, and I was listened to with more or less enthusiasm,
until it was obvious the slump was passing. It was a bad dream well
over—good times had come. Why lay plans for the future? By 1926 there
were no longer audiences to listen to a talk on preparing for
unemployment. Apparently everybody, even President Hoover, who had been
the all-efficient chairman of the Conference, forgot all about the
program.
On the whole my little excursions into public service were discouraging
and disillusioning; but they did convince me that I was right when I
gave as one of my reasons for not going on to President Wilson’s Tariff
Commission the fact that I was not fitted for the kind of work a
commission or conference requires.
I was an observer, a reporter. What interested me was watching my fellow
members in action: the silent wariness of Secretary Hoover; the amused
and slightly contemptuous smile of Charlie Schwab when he heard a woman
had been put on the coal committee; the unwillingness of representatives
of rival mining unions to do anything to relieve the immediate suffering
of West Virginia miners, sufferings so useful in their campaigns; the
stubborn look on the faces of those who fought over jurisdiction in an
effort to reach an adjustment which would permit hungry men to take up
work waiting for them; the quick political lineup; the clever political
plays; the gradual fade-out of the objective, its replacement by party
ambitions.
All together it was a revealing study of the reason there is so little
steady progress in the world. These failures joined to the refusal to
have anything to do with the League of Nations put an end to my hope
that the War had taught us much of anything. We were not ready for the
sacrifices necessary for peace, nor had we grasped the natural methods
by which things grow. We believed we could talk, petition, legislate,
vote ourselves into peace and prosperity. We had not learned that toil
and self-control are three-fourths of any achievement, and that toil and
self-control begin with the individual.
I went on with my talking in these years with a troubled mind. Continue
this way, and we would destroy democracy. We had allowed, often
encouraged, groups of self-interested individuals to have their way.
That meant transformations in government machinery, new types of
leaders, a multiplication of the children of privilege we had always so
feared, the substitution of humanitarianism for ethics, sympathy for
justice.
I was discouraged, but I never lost faith in our scheme of things. I
never came to believe that we must change democracy for socialism or
communism or a dictatorship. You do not change human nature by changing
the machinery. Under freedom human nature has the best chances for
growth, for correcting its weaknesses and failures, for developing its
capacities. It is on these improvements in men that the future welfare
of the world depends. So I believed, and so I argued as I went about,
though sometimes, I confess, with a spirit so low that my tongue was in
my cheek.
Such was my growing disillusionment when in 1926 I was asked to go to
Italy to report on the Fascist State of Benito Mussolini, now four years
in power, a scandal to the democracies at which he openly jeered, but an
even greater one to the Socialists and Communists who once had thought
him on the way to being the strongest radical leader in Europe.
I knew little of what had gone on in Italy after the end of the War. I
knew the parliamentary system had broken down; I knew there had been two
years of guerrilla warfare after the Peace Conference, a period in which
it was nip and tuck whether the next ruler of Italy would be Communist
or Fascist. The Fascists under their leader Mussolini had won out. I had
been amazed, and had never ceased to be amazed, that the dramatic march
on Rome which ended in changing a parliamentary form of government into
a dictatorship had been carried out without bloodshed. An astonished
world had seen tens of thousands of unorganized and in part unarmed men
march from every point in Italy to Rome, call for Mussolini, get him by
order of the King and then march home again—not a brick thrown, not a
head broken. It was the most amazing transfer of government I had known
of.
But I had never given much attention to what had followed. I had never
asked myself if it was inevitable that a dictator should arise in Italy.
I had never asked who was this man Mussolini or what was this corporate
state which was emerging.
Uneasy as I was over the way things were going in the United States, I
vaguely felt when I was asked to go look all this up that possibly there
were lessons there. Possibly I might learn something from Italy’s
experience about the process by which manacles are put on free
government. However, the real reason I went to Italy was because I was
offered so large a sum that I thought I could not afford to refuse.
My friends did their best to discourage my going. Down in Washington a
worried undersecretary who gave me my passport and letters of
introduction told me pessimistically that I probably should be arrested.
“But why?” I asked.
“Well, that is what is happening now to all our Americans. They drink
too much, talk too much. The chief reason, as far as we can make out, is
that they have to arrest them because they are attacking the government.
We do the same thing here now and then, you know.”
In Paris my best friends, among them Mr. Jaccaci, so much of an Italian
that he talked the dialects of several provinces, told me with all
seriousness that I should be searched. I must not carry letters to
members of the opposition, nor books hostile to Mussolini. Now I was
armed with things of that sort, collected in Washington, New York, and
Paris. I did not propose to give them up without a struggle.
I was told I should find no newspapers excepting those sympathetic to
the regime—a serious handicap, as I always count largely on newspapers.
I must always use the Fascist salute. I took this so seriously that I
practiced it in my Paris bedroom. I must not speak French. I was
counting on that, as I speak no Italian. That is, I started off to Italy
with a large collection of “don’ts” coming from people I considered
informed. If I had not had a natural dislike of giving up an undertaking
I never would have carried out my assignment.
However, at the end of the first day in Rome, a very exciting day, I
awakened to the fact that nobody had searched my bags for incriminating
documents, that I had talked French all day, and that I hadn’t noticed
anybody using the Fascist salute, and, most important, that I had found
at every newspaper kiosk all the French and English papers side by side
with the Italian. It gave me confidence. As a matter of fact in the four
to five months that I was in Italy I did practically what I had planned
to do, and nobody paid any attention to me. My mail was never interfered
with, so far as I know. That is, none of the dire prophecies of
interference to which I had listened at the start came true.
I do not mean to say it was always easy to get to the people with whom I
wanted to talk; more than once, when I succeeded, I found the person
fearful of quotation. I do not mean to say that I found no revolts. Down
in Palermo, in corners of Milan and Florence and Turin, as a matter of
fact almost everywhere, I ran across bitter critics of the new regime
such as I hear every day in this year of 1938 of the President of the
United States; but on the whole even good parliamentarians were
accepting Mussolini. “He has saved the country,” men told me. “We don’t
accept his methods, we don’t believe in dictatorship; but it is better
than anarchy.”
Making my headquarters at Rome, I went over the country fairly well,
particularly the industrial sections. I visited Turin with its
hydroelectric developments, its great Fiat factory, its artificial silk,
all plants of the first order. I spent some days in Milan, visited the
great Pirelli plant, at the moment making underground cables for
Chicago. I saw what was left of the cooperatives at Bologna. I climbed
into that plucky little independent Republic of San Marino. Mussolini
had been there just before I arrived. They were all for him. He worked
and made people work. That is what had made San Marino.
I went south into Calabria, over into Sicily—always looking for the
effects of the new regime on the life of the people. There was no doubt
sensible things were going on—redemption of land, extension of water
power, amazing efforts at wheat production; and the people were
accepting the regime with understanding, realists that they were.
The first thing that springs to my mind now when I recall those months
in Italy is a long procession of men, women, and children bent in labor.
They harvested fields of rice, wheat, alfalfa, laying grain in perfect
swaths; they sat on the ground, stripping and sorting tobacco leaves.
Tiny girls, old women crowded narrow rooms, embroidering with sure
fingers lovely designs on linen, fine and coarse; they cooked their
meals before all the world in the narrow streets of Naples; they carried
home at sunset from the terraces or slopes of mountains great baskets of
grapes, olives, lemons—young women straight and firm, their burdens
poised surely on their heads, old women bent under the weight on their
backs. They drove donkeys so laden that only a nodding head, a switching
tail were visible; they filled the roads with their gay two-wheeled
carts, tended sheep, ran machines, sat in markets, spun, weaved, molded,
built—a world of work.
Mingled with these pictures of labor were equally vagrant ones of these
same men and women at play: holiday and Sunday crowds filling the
streets, the roads, the cinemas, the dancing pavilions, the squares of
little towns that traced their history back clearly more than two
thousand years. In those squares, gay with flags and streamers and light
and booths, in the evenings, throngs held their breath as to the notes
of soft music the lithe figures of the ropewalkers passed high overhead
with slow and rhythmic steps.
It was hard to realize when I looked on them that six years earlier
these same people had been as badly out of step as they were perfectly
in step at the present moment, that instead of rhythmic labor, there was
a clash of disorder and revolt. Men and women refused not only to work
themselves, but to let other people work. Grain died in the fields,
threshing machines were destroyed, factories were seized, shops were
looted, railway trains ran as suited the crew. Sunday was a day, not of
rest, amusement, prayer, but of war; fêtes were dangerous, liable to be
broken up by raids. Instead of the steady balance, orderly action, so
conspicuous today, were the disorganization, anger, violence of a people
unprotected in its normal life: a people become the prey of a dozen
clashing political parties and not knowing where to look for a Moses to
lead it out of their Egypt. How could it be, one asked, that in so brief
a time a people should drop its clubs and pick up its tools?
There was only one answer: Mussolini. Already he was a legend, a name
everywhere to conjure with. I used it myself after I had talked with
him, on scared gentlemen to whom I had letters of introduction, and who
feared quotation: “But Mussolini saw me—talked with me.” Nothing too
much trouble after that.
But what kind of man was this dictator?
“You must go and see Mussolini,” our able and friendly Ambassador Henry
P. Fletcher told me one morning while I was working on the Embassy’s
voluminous records of what had gone on in Italy since the end of the
War. I balked.
“I am not ready with the questions I want to ask him.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Fletcher, “just go down and have a chat with him.”
With my notion of Mussolini gathered largely from English and American
as well as hostile Italian sources, the word seemed utterly incongruous.
Could one chat with this bombastic and terrifying individual who never
listened, told you what to think, to say? Impossible. But of course I
went.
The most exciting and interesting hour and a half I spent in Italy was
in an anteroom watching twoscore or more persons who were waiting to be
received, watching them go in so scared, come out exultant, go in
inflated, come out collapsed. There was no one of them but was anxious,
even the Admiral of the Fleet then at Ostia. He walked nervously about
while he was waiting, adjusting his uniform, and when his turn came
strode in as if marching in a parade.
Nothing I saw in Italy, as I have said, was more interesting to me.
Though I must confess that all the time there was an undercurrent of
nervousness. What I was afraid of was that my French would go to pieces,
provided he gave me a chance to speak at all—of which I had a doubt.
What if I should forget and say “vous” instead of “votre excellence”?
Should I be shot at sunrise?
It was all so different from what I had anticipated. I must have misread
and misheard the reports of interviews to have had such an unpleasant
impression of what was waiting me. As I crossed the long room towards
the desk Mussolini came around to meet me, asked me to take one of the
two big chairs which stood in front of his desk—and, as he seated me,
was apologizing, actually apologizing, in excellent English for keeping
me waiting. As he did it I saw that he had a most extraordinary smile,
and that when he smiled he had a dimple.
Nothing could have been more natural, simple, and courteous than the way
he put me at my ease. His French, in which he spoke after his first
greeting, was fluent, excellent. I found myself not at all afraid to
talk, eager to do so. If he had not been as eager, I think I should have
done all the talking, for luckily at once we hit on a common
interest—better housing. His smiling face became excited and stern. He
pounded the table.
“Men and women must have better places in which to live. You cannot
expect them to be good citizens in the hovels they are living in, in
parts of Italy.”
He went on to talk with appreciation and understanding of the various
building undertakings already well advanced, some of which I had seen in
different parts of the country. He talked at length of the effect on
women of crowded, cheerless homes. “A reason for their drinking too much
wine sometimes,” he mused.
He was particularly interested in what prohibition was doing to working
people in the United States. “I am dry,” he said, “but I would not have
Italy dry [_sec_].” And he amused me by quickly changing _sec_ to
_seche_. “We need wine to keep alive the social sense in our
hard-working people.”
Altogether it was an illuminating half-hour, and when Mussolini
accompanied me to the door and kissed my hand in the gallant Italian
fashion I understood for the first time an unexpected phase of the man
which makes him such a power in Italy. He might be—was, I believed—a
fearful despot, but he had a dimple.
I left Italy, my head alive with speculations as to the future of the
man. There was a chance, and it seemed to me a very good one, that he
would be assassinated. Three dramatic attempts were made on his life
while I was there, attempts known to the public. There may have been
others, the authorities kept quiet. As I was sailing there came a rash
attack on him at Bologna, the assassin being torn to pieces, so it was
said, by an enraged crowd. For months after my return I watched my
morning paper for the headline, “Mussolini Assassinated.”
Of course there was a chance—so far as I could see, it was what
Mussolini himself believed he could realize—to bring Italy to an even
keel economically, by thrift, hard work, development of resources and by
a system of legitimate colonization in the parts of the earth where he
could obtain land, by treaty or by purchase.
And there was a third possibility to one at all familiar with the course
of dictators in the world, particularly with the one with whom you
instinctively compare Mussolini—Napoleon Bonaparte—that the day would
come when he would overreach himself in a too magnificent attempt, an
attempt beyond the forces of his country and so of himself, and he would
finally go down as Napoleon went down.
Are Ethiopia and the alliance with Franco and the rebels of Spain to be
to Mussolini what Spain and Russia were to Napoleon?
I was glad to breathe the air of the United States. It was still free,
whatever our follies. There was at that moment no dictator in sight—no
talk of one. But it was not Mussolini or the Corporate State which
mattered to us: it was what was back of them. Why had parliamentary
government broken down in Italy, the Italy of Garibaldi, of Cavour,
Victor Emmanuel? Why had a dictator been able to replace it with a new
form of government? Could this happen in the government of Washington
and Lincoln? Those were the questions of importance to Americans. There
was where there was something to learn.
19
LOOKING OVER THE COUNTRY
My chief consolation in what I looked on as the manhandling of
democratic ideals and processes in all ranks of society, public and
private, was Abraham Lincoln. In spite of his obvious limitations and
mistakes he had won the biggest battle for freedom we have yet had to
fight. He had done it by taking time to figure things out, by sticking
to the conclusions he had reached so long as, and no longer than, they
seemed to him sound, by squaring his conduct always with what he
conceived to be just, moral principles. The more I knew of him, the
better I liked him and the more strongly I felt we ought as a people to
know about how he did things, not ask how he would solve a problem
tormenting us, but how he would go to work to solve it.
Feeling as I did and do about him, I have kept him always on my
workbench. There has never been a time since the War that I have not had
a long or short piece of Lincoln work on hand. The result has been five
books, big and little, and a continuous stream of articles, long and
short.
The only fresh water in this Lincolnian stream was in a book I called
“In the Footsteps of the Lincolns.” Beginning with the first of the
family in this country—Samuel, who came in 1637—I traced them mile by
mile from Hingham, Massachusetts, where Samuel started, down through
Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, the
wilderness of Kentucky, southwestern Indiana, into Illinois, to the
final resting place. I ran down the records that had been left behind,
copied the inscriptions on gravestones, went over houses in which they
had lived, looked up the families into which they had married, the
friends they had made. When I finished my journey I felt that I had
quite definitely and finally rescued the Lincolns from the ranks of poor
white trash where political enemies had so loved to place them.
I have the satisfaction of knowing that this seven-generation pilgrimage
of the Lincoln family has been added to the itineraries which
enthusiastic students include in the cult of Lincoln now growing so
strong in this country. I have never had an honor which pleased me more
than a certificate from this group naming me Lincoln Pilgrim Number One.
My conviction that we needed in all our difficulties to familiarize
ourselves with good models, sound laboratory practices led me to publish
in 1932 a life of Owen D. Young. Mr. Young had impressed me as being
just what I called him, “A New Type of Industrial Leader.” And how we
needed one! I had first heard of him in connection with what was called
the President’s Second Industrial Conference. After what I regarded as
the cowardly retreat of the members of the President’s first conference
Mr. Wilson had called a second with the same objective, a distinguished
body of men, among them Owen D. Young.
The sessions of this conference were all secret—a contrast to the noisy
publicity which had surrounded the first gathering, and which had been
partly responsible for its failure, the political-minded conferees being
able in this way to speak to the country when they made speeches to
their fellows—a privilege they valued more than trying to understand and
cooperate with their fellows.
It was not long before I began to hear rumors of the satisfactory way
the second conference was going and to hear the name of Owen D. Young as
the man who as much as anybody else was leading to a broad, fair program
of recommendations. His fairness, based on his experience in industrial
relations, came as a surprise to not a few of the members of the
conference, for Mr. Young represented the General Electric Company.
Secretary Wilson, who was then at the head of the Federal Labor
Department, declared that Mr. Young had no fear and no prejudice as a
conferee, that he worked with an open mind. Attorney General Gregory
said of him that there was no man on the conference who was so
progressive in his philosophy of industrial relations. These opinions
from the inside of the conference, followed by its admirable published
report, with which I learned Mr. Young had had much to do, set me to
following his work in labor matters so far as it reached the public.
I was deeply impressed by the showing he made as a negotiator on the
Dawes and Young committees called to settle the thorny problem of what
reparations Germany should make to the Allies—the first sitting in 1924
and the second, in 1929—Mr. Young being the chairman of the latter.