[This entry gives some insight into my father’s post-Great Depression hope for “collectivistic, or socialistic, capitalism.” Using as a starting point a lecture by Harry M. Fife, a Middlebury professor of economics from 1925-1950, my father writes about the exposed shortcomings of private business and the emerging potential of “public business.” It’s impossible to read this entry and its phrases — “general fabric of irresponsibility,” “rapacious self-interest,” “great spree of speculation” — without drawing parallels to the financial-market and mortgage manipulations that sparked our recent deep recession. It seems that the “corporate-finance-banker-imperialistic capitalism” of the 20s, 30’s and 40’s had some staying power. So did the ability of politicians and ideologues to demonize terms and concepts such as “socialism” and “welfare.” How quaint that my father could write: “No man can find moral justification for getting into business for the sake of profits.” And how sad that this sentiment is so at odds with the reality of our present-day world.]
December 11, 1942 (Middlebury College)
Fife gave a swell lecture this morning. He traced through the several phases of capitalism from the “putting-out” period down to the recent, and not yet extinct corporate-finance-banker-imperialistic capitalism. This last fits in as both cause and effect of the present woes of the world. But we are advancing into the period of collectivistic, or socialistic, capitalism. Please keep your thinking constructive, he said. Corporate organization is indispensable in our society. What we need to find out is how to keep the advantages of the corporation and get rid of its disadvantages.
Old Fife embodies the true spirit of our times better than any other prof that I have, not excepting Doc Cook. I’m going to ride high on that spirit not because I believe in following the crowd, but because I have no other choice, no other urge, but this. It seems to me that the moral issue is more clearly defined these days than it has been for a long time. Up until the depression of the 30’s there must have been room for a great deal of doubt in a young man’s mind if he asked himself just what his position in society should be. On the one hand there was the dominant business interest in private hands, apparently serving the community as well as anything available. On the other hand was the growing volume of public business, barely articulate, and yet containing dim possibilities of great future good in society. But a man would have had to be morally keen to have seen these possibilities, and courageous to invest his life work in bringing them to fruition.
This problem no long[er] exists. No man can find moral justification for getting into business for the sake of profits. This, indeed, must have always seemed narrow justification to some businessmen, even when it was thickly glossed over with the ideal theory of the self-regulatory, free competitive system, automatically assuring the greatest good to the greatest number. Many intelligent men who were hand and glove in the system must have sometimes wondered, nonetheless, if things were actually so fine as the theory suggested. A lot of people knew that things were actually very bad, but they were the people on the bottom, the working masses, and their voice didn’t count. In the land of “free enterprise” it was obviously their own fault that they stayed down; – they lacked the brains, or the ability, or something. It must have been possible for many men on the top to reason this way with perfect sincerity.
But this ground got shakier all the time, especially after the first World War. The moral compromise involved became more and more obvious to men in high positions, and [as] a result they began to lose faith in the system to which they were allied. They lost their integrity. Out of this general fabric of irresponsibility, the whole tendency of too rapacious self-interest which had been inherent in the system for a long time, though to a large degree rationalized out of sight, now came into its own. We embarked on the great spree of speculation, with all the bars down. It was an out-and-out case of dog eat dog, at least among the men of power and influence in our society who were to a large degree responsible for decent social order and justice. In that mad decade this class abdicated its position as the recognized leading class of the nation.
So the choice today is no problem. I am on the side that has stepped into the breach, – the New Deal side, the socialist side. And it’s a good side to be on, because it’s fresh and new, with an untainted, if short, history, and a tremendous future full of work. We’re not out for revenge, but as Fife says, our job is to build an economy for welfare, and not for money profits.
Paul Davis Journals Blog 