THIS QUARTER
11
this
support and asked Communists
not
to vote for him. And thus,
when the Party's leading pamphleteer crosses the Atlantic to propa–
gandize for the People's Front and the New Deal, he is barred from
entry by the New Deal's State Department on the grounds that his
political philosophy advocates the overthrow by force of ...
theN~
Deal. "Complete automatism," Bergson writes, "is only reached in the
official who performs
·his
duty like a mere machine, or again in the un–
consciousness that marks an administrative regulation working with
inexorable fatality and setting itself up for a law of nature."
SEMANTICS
IS THE
OPIUM
OF
STUART CHASE
Already semantics seems to be well on its way
to that limbo which holds humanism and tech–
nocracy. Stuarts Chase's book has sunk witho.ut
a trace; Thurman Arnold has given up expo-
sing the Anti-Trust laws as purely verbal rituals,
the better to function in his new job as Assistant Attorney General
in charge of enforcing those same laws; only
Common Sense
con–
tinues valiantly to play the old 'word magic' tune. One more political
escape mechanism of the middle class intellectual has broken down.
In semantics-in itself, a most useful study-the liberal's tend–
ency to be misled by phrases appears in reverse, coming out as
an
undue preoccupation with the
abuse
of words.
If
only people
could be got to call things by their right names, then all would be
well-as though the economic contradictions of capitalism would
not remain no matter what they were called. In
Save America First,
Jerome Frank suggests that "capitalism" in this country should be
called either "the profit system" or "Americapitalism." President
Charles
R.
Hook of the American Manfactuurers' Association is
even more squeamish: he prefers "the inventive system." And Mr.
E. T. Weir, of National Steel Corp., recently remarked of The Labor
Problem: "The popular and prevalent impression of the word, 'bar–
gaining,' is horse-trading, one group trying to get the better of an–
other.
If
we could substitute the idea of 'collective cooperation,' we
would take one of the most forward steps that has ever been made
in
industrial relations:" Thus the right and the left wing of American
capitalism are equally concerned about-words. Like Moliere's
bourgeois, the American business man has been talking semantics
all
his
life-especially when there is a strike on-without knowing it.
As
a curiosity of literature; we may note that the first, and by
far
the most thorough-going, semanticists are to be found in
Gulliver's
Travels,
Book III, Chapter V. Swift writes of . "a scheme for en-
