434
PARTISAN REVrEW
Science, and no economic hero; and on the business side, he is cor–
rectly seen as part of the big finance.
It was the little man of business, with all his engaging human
characteristics, who became the hero of liberalism in the early
twentieth century. He has been seen as the somewhat woebegone in–
heritor of the old captain's tradition, even if only by default. The
harder his struggle has become, the inore sympathetic and the more
heroized his image has been drawn; yet his plight has been a sad one,
for he cannot live up to the heritage by which he is burdened.
The laws and planning of the Progressive Era, the muck-raking,
the square deals and new freedoms were, at least verbally, attempts to
buck up the little businessman, that he might better live up to the care–
fully presented image of him. Much of the New Deal was dealt in his
honor, lest he become a forgotten man. And in the decade after 1933,
he became even more officially the hero of the liberal system; no less
than 390 bills in his behalf were introduced for consideration by the
Congress.
The Monographs and
1-~earings
of the Temporary National Eco–
nomic Committee are the last great scholarly and official monument
to liberalism's little hero. Like other large attempts in behalf of things
as they are imagined or hoped to be, the TNEC fetishizes competition
and heroizes little business. But it does so under an enormous burden
of fact. Only the necessary screen of political rhetoric, the peculiar
structure of political representation, and the myopia induced by
small-town life has kept this senatorial fetish and this heroic
image alive. Now that the TNEC is well buried by war, we may
treat it as a symbol,* having positive as well as negative references.
For underneath its rhetoric and resting on its facts, we may discern
the present role of competition as well as some new types of economic
men and women, who are living a new competitive life in the age of
corporate bureaucracy.
What the million dollars' worth of TNEC facts demonstrate, no
matter how they are arranged, is the detailed accuracy of Veblen's
remark that competition is by no means dead, only now it is chiefly
"competition between the businessman who controls production, on
*
An excellent case study and partial summary of the H earings has recently
been written by David Lynch:
The Concentration of Economic Power,
Columbia
University Press (New York, 1946). Some of the TNEC series have been brought
up through the war in a publication of the Smaller War Plants: "Economic Con–
centration and World War II," U. S. Senate, 79th Congress, 2nd Session, Docu–
ment No. 206 (Washington, 1946).
