BOOKS
THE WALLACE CRUSADE
TOWARD WORLD PEACE. By Henry A. Wollace. Reyna!
&
Hitchcock.
$
1.75.
What sort of comment is appropriate to this book?
Let me suppose, for a few paragraphs, that it was written by
x,
a
man in no way public: a worried small businessman, perhaps, dictating
at spare moments in his Topeka office, or a professor who, half-awakened
by the rising cost of living from his academic nap, has mounted his
rebuilt typewriter to descend into the market place.
I might, then, first wonder how the MS had ever, in these days
of price squeezes, found a commercial publisher. Or I might even reflect
that Reyna!
&
Hitchcock, whose judgment had accepted it, collapsed
not long after into the arms of Harcourt, Brace.
I might then have a sentence or two on the style: a style of a
dreariness not to be surpassed in a composition class for retarded sopho–
mores. No wisp of freshness anywhere disturbs the dead beat of this
first-reader syntax, these faceless images, this funeral-parlor piety:
I submit that this program of peace, security, and abundance is the only
one which holds out hope in a troubled world in the most confused year in
history. . . . And so I call our new party the party of hope.
It
is also the party
of faith, faith that the creative potentialities which exist in every human soul
can be harnessed by conscious, voluntary cooperation for harmonious work on
behalf of maximum abundance widely shared. . . . The party of hope needs
workers to bring light to the dark corners where the afflicted are oppressed
by
the parties of Hatred, Despair, Scarcity, Exploitation, Hunger, and War,
"The purpose of this book,"
x
tells us, "is to give the underlying
facts," and he upbraids press and radio and other writers for not dealing
in facts. His own technique is, oddly enough, distinguished by its ability
to drain all concrete content from his terms. Never is an abstract word
plainly defined. The scores of references to "reactionary capitalism" and
"reactionary capitalists" include not a single name of any man or organ–
ization that might be covered by these cottony blankets.
X's
world of
"progressives," "common man," "men of vision," "exploiters," "real
701
