96
PARTISAN REVIEW
the
Bulletin
of the American Association for Social Security, and
later the
New Leader.
Groggy from threats of libel, the
Nation
faded before the last round, although the threats were wholly bluff,
as later experience showed. As for book publishers, the first two,
as the going got hotter, incontinently broke their contracts and
abandoned their advances. By the time the last one turned his
option into a contract, Thurman Arnold's anti·trust prosecution of
the American Medical Association and Dr. Fishbein had scooped a
considerable part of my story, thereby supporting the principal
thesis of this article:
That monopoly capitalism in the present
period reveals a progressive atrophy of essential functions, muck–
raking being one of these functions; hence government is forced to
take over muckraking to a greater degree than formerly.
5.
The Sociological Ersatz
In the atmosphere of confusion and apprehension that char–
acterized the post-war period, sociological "fact-finding" had an
obvious appeal. Serious muckraking was no longer possible with–
out attacking the whole existing set-up of capitalist ownership and
aontrol; and it was not permissible to use major channels of social
communication for this purpose. But it was necessary to relieve
' the growing social tensions. The fact-finding, more or less onan–
istic technique of the statistical sociologists not only served this
purpose admirably, but gave profitable employment to the job–
hungry "social scientists" who were being turned out in increasing
quantities by the universities. During the Hoover administration
several million dollars went into the production of the denatured
and footless compilation entitled
Recent Economic, Trends.
The
Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, subsidized jointly by
several large foundations, consumed four years and a million dol–
lars. A long sequence of factual studies was produced by the
National Bureau of Economic Research, founded and endowed by
big business for the purpose of "finding the facts" and so narrow–
ing the zone of social and political controversy. The National
Bureau's studies of the panic cycle have been going on for at least
two decades to such good effect that a well known social scientist
recently opined that in a hundred years from now something may
be
known about this characteristic phenomenon of the capitalist
economy. Meanwhile, however, Dr. Wesley C. Mitchell, director
