Education for All, Balanced Budget or Not

[This lengthy entry — pared down from a much longer original — followed an evening of caroling by my father and his two siblings while home for the Christmas holiday. After meeting a young farmer among the carolers, my father went on to discuss his belief that all people should have access to the highest educational opportunities of which they’re capable. In this sentiment I see a foreshadowing of his eventual work in university administration and development. My father argues that, if our country is able to pay whatever the cost necessary to wage war, it can also pay the cost of offering the best educational opportunities to all its citizens, regardless of their economic circumstances.

As in the previous posting, my father states his opinion based on lessons learned during the Great Depression — i.e. the need for government spending to address pressing societal and economic needs, regardless of “such bogies of finance as the ‘balanced budget.'” Our country today faces many of the same challenges and, unfortunately, it seems that the no-taxes/cut-spending crowd is prevailing over those (most economists included) who warn that cutting back on stimulus spending too soon could stall, and possibly reverse, the halting economic growth we’ve begun to achieve. My father’s youthful idealism that America’s values were shifting to emphasize “social success” rather than “money success” has since been shown, repeatedly, to be wishful thinking.]

December 23, 1942 (Underhill, Vermont)

…At nine o’clock Kent and his wife arrived, and we proceeded to the main business of the evening. Most of the people who appeared to acknowledge our singing were old folks. They seemed genuinely pleased.

Kent is a young farmer, 23 years old. The local board had deferred him because he’s running one of the largest farms in the vicinity. There’s nothing deceptive in his nature. His face is pleasant, broad featured, Yankee; his body is big and strong, his hands massive. I suppose you’d call him raw-boned, a typical farm type. Bashfulness is a quality completely foreign to him. He was well-acquainted with me from the moment of shaking hands. Before I left him at midnight he had given me a frank appraisal of his fortunes and hopes…

I don’t envy Kent. He reminds me of Thoreau’s farmer who went through life carrying his farm on his back, a slave to his occupation. Kent isn’t degraded yet to this unhappy state, but the time may come. I just can’t see how he has much chance. His wife is a good kid, willing to work hard… he seems quite proud of her, partly because she’s an “out-of-state” girl, partly because she’s had an education…

…There is certainly a formidable barrier between the well-educated and the uneducated which can’t be melted down by simple appeals to humanitarianism. This doesn’t offer an excuse for snobbishness on the part of the well-educated. It does mean that the channels for communication between the two levels are considerably circumscribed. What a democratic state needs is an educational system which offers an opportunity for the maximum development of native talent (mental ability) in whatever economic level it appears. We should not be much concerned for the existence of these economic levels, so long as those at the bottom can earn enough to live without suffering. What we must avoid is the freezing of these levels. We know that exceptional minds appear at the bottom as well as at the top of the economic heap. The economic factors, however, have thus far been given far too much weight in determining what minds shall come to fruitful expression in the world. When genius is allowed to starve to death behind economic barriers, this is one of the most disastrous expenses that any society can shoulder. If the expenditure of money can build an educational system that will make such starvation or malformation of genius highly improbable, no sum will be too large to spend.

This was the point which was emphasized in that supplement to Fortune which I read in Burlington yesterday at the library. The National Economy, it was called. We have come traditionally to exalt money to a position where it becomes our master, instead of keeping it where it should be, in subjection as a slave to help us achieve social profits. We have too long been tyrannized into poverty and national weakness and unhappiness by such bogies of finance as the “balanced budget.” It’s taking a terrible war to break the delusion. We are finding out that we can spend just as much money as we need to preserve our national existence under the hammer blows of enemies who learned the same lesson several years before we did. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of billions our national debt runs into on the books, as long as we keep our national destiny in our own hands, – it doesn’t matter, if we apply the knowledge that we already have for the control of our financial system. This, of course, is the basic idea in the compensatory government spending theory of Keynes, Hansen, and their associates.

It is indeed, not only a new theory, but a new philosophy of economics, and marks the overall change from the last century’s focus on “money” success to this century’s focus on social success. It can’t be repeated too often that money is properly a tool, and not a tyrant, for men.

We do have the knowledge and the mechanical means now to assure every inhabitant of our country, and ultimately the world, freedom from economic insecurity. While this cannot be considered as the highest aim of man’s activity, it is essential to any permanent progress of man in his spiritual sphere. It is very important that economic security always be recognized as a means to a better life, and not as an end in itself, or as a guarantee of that better life. For life can be “better” only in a moral sense, and science, including economics, which we are using as a means to that better life, is in itself amoral. The Nazis are demonstrating that it can very well be used as a means to a worse life.

We don’t debase ourselves or jeopardize our ideals by studying our science as avidly as do the Germans. In fact, we criminally betray ourselves to destruction if we do not seize upon science for all it can show us about the waging of war and the building of the new world order. The significant difference comes if we use science as a weapon on the side of Christian morality. Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr. makes this point clear in an interesting exposition of the science of geopolitics in the Dec. 21^st issue of Life. We don’t damn ourselves by using what knowledge we can discover to make ourselves powerful, if we use our power to give our ideals of Christian morality expression in the lower but nonetheless necessary, level of economic life. The name of [Halford J.] MacKinder’s book on geopolitics was Democratic Ideals and Reality. He brought it out in England in 1918. Our trouble was that we wrote out a peace in which democratic ideals continued to be abstracted from reality.

What excites me now is that today there are a lot of men who know that we must not repeat this disastrous experience. Keats it was who maintained that the ideal can’t be separated from the real. Democratic ideals are just so much hot air until they are expressed as relationships of men to men, and men to goods in the marketplace.

Read Full Post »

Capitalism’s Failings and Socialism’s Promise

[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.

Read Full Post »