12
PARTISAN REVIEW.
tirely abolishing all words whatsoever" which was developed by cer–
tain sages of Lagado. "Since words are only names for
things,"
these
sages decided to "carry about them such
things
as were necessary to
express the particular business they were to discourse on . . . I have
often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of
their packs, like peddlers among us; who when they met in the
streets would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold con–
versation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help
each other resume their burtheris, and take their leave."
This
suggests,
by the way, that what the semanticists are really after is a sort of
in–
tellectual barter system. They feel that
if
only we could do away
with the currency of language-so debased and counterfeit by now,
and so easily manipulated by unscrupulous speculators--we could
see just what we are buying and selling with our ten-dollar words.
Another curiosity of literature is the Semantic Interpretation of
History. Jerome Frank, for example, writes: "Our own Civil War was
a conflict brought on by words. The hot-headed wordmongers of
Massachusetts poured verbal poison into the thought processes of
their neighbors. In the South, the poison-word distillers did the same.
Men stopped sane thinking.... Monstrous, overpowering words took
possession of men's minds-ABOLITION, SECESSION, STATES'
RIGHTS. Fort Sumter was the result." This is the usual method of
writing history, simply stood on its head: here the slogans are villains,
there they are heroes.
The trouble with semantics is that, as in the passage just quoted,
it doesn't carry its analysis far enough. Marx, for example, showed
that Lincoln formulated the issues of the Civil War in stilted juridical
terms which concealed the real economic issues at stake, and that he
did this by insisting that the struggle was essentially a constitutional
question. In this sense, Marx was operating semantically. But he
went on to supply his own conception of the true historical content
of the issues involved in the war-something which lies ·outside the
province of semantics. Unless this is
don~as
Messers. Chase,
Frank and Arnold almost never do--the Semantic Interpretation of
Hyory is a dangerous half-truth.
By the time of the World War, American liberal thought had at
least raised itself to the level of simple materialism, as in the Beard
school of historians. Now it seems to be regressing to its customary pre–
occupation with abstractions. This preoccupation may be positive–
as in the
Nation's
drum pounding for '"democracy"-or it may be
negative-as with the semanticists,
~ho
think our problems would
be solved if we could but agree on a definition of the term "democ–
racy." We prefer the second to the first attitude. But we must point
