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desperate conditions, members of minority groups, etc., can become
communists even today for quite different, and more legitimate–
though mistaken-reasons.) This means that a new generation is be–
ing deprived of the educational luxury of the direct communist ex–
perience: the luxury, at any rate, has become too expensive to be
voluntarily permitted. But even without the direct experience, the
members of these newly influential social groups, or some of them,
show themselves better able than the businessmen to understand and
combat communism.
This is conspicuously true of some members of the armed services.
During these years since 1945, many officers, themselves never touched
by communism, have been advancing remarkably in their under–
standing of communism. I think that the reason for this
is
that the
soldiers
know
that both the future of the country and their own
lives are at stake, whereas civilians, though it is true also for them,
do not have this knowledge so directly and continually in mind. Fur–
thermore, the soldiers, in their thoughts about communism, have to
deal with the most concrete and inescapable problems of victory and
defeat. This concreteness of the presented problems is also a stimulus
to the labor leaders to seek the truth instead of phrases, as it is in–
creasingly to the governmental administrators-even to lower levels of
the ponderous bureaucracy which is an object of such distaste to
business.
If
businessmen in general continue to be as shortsighted and in–
competent in the struggle against communism as they have been in
the past,
if
they are incapable of leading that struggle, there are, then,
other forces available to conduct it and to carry it through. These
other forces, newly powerful in our society, with new men and new
interests, together with newly developing sections of the business class
itself, are in any case gradually pushing the old-line businessmen
aside.* The businessmen of the United States, whatever their special
views, are loyal. They are not like the capitalists of Russia, who, in
1905, were indifferent to the outcome of the Japanese war when not
actively in favor of Japanese victory; or like the many French capita–
lists in 1939 who were ready to accept the organization of Europe by
*
I have described this process, which is going on throughout the world, in
The Managerial Revolution
(John Day: 1941).
