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PARTISAN REVIEW
going too far over toward apologia. But it need only be recognized
to be avoided. The bigger danger is that of forgetting the great fact
of dynamic change in America. The image in the mind of European
critics especially is likely to be still that of the America of Sacco and
Vanzetti and Herbert Hoover and the Little Steel massacre and the
barbs of Mencken. I am sorry to say that Harold Laski's big book,
The American Democracy,
with all its strength of indictment, would
have been better if he had broken away from the image he carried
in his mind from the America he knew in the twenties.
Much in American life has changed in our generation, and not
in
all respects for good. There have been a series of technological
revolutions, with a shift of occupations and of classes; a splitting of
the property atom; a change
in
the energy-direction of trade unions;
an uprooting of men from soil and craft; a shift from a civilization
of competition and "go" to a consumer's civilization, with emerging
mass-media for recreation and for the first time the problems of mass
leisure; the reaching of an equilibrium
in
the economy through who'
Galbraith describes as the "countervailing power" of Big Business,
Big Unions, Big Government, Big Agriculture, and Big Distribution;
a steep tax structure that compels reconsideration of the gap between
welfare capitalism and socialism; a new military public works pro–
gram into which most of the taxes go, and which serves as a crutch
for the economy; a military caste with a new military elite; shifts
in the American character-structure; and new mass-arts that have
created a popular culture scarcely known until our day.
This is put down helter-skelter, and anyone who digs into
American civilization today can put the new pattern together for
himself. For myself, I feel we are well started toward a fresh and
whole view of our society. What is most hopeful is that there is
less cant being spoken and written today about our popular culture
than ever before. The dislocations of the changes
in
our life have
dislocated our entrenched attitudes as well. I hear less than before
about our "materialism," or about the "hollowness" of political
freedoms, or about the two major parties as Tweedledum and
Tweedledee, or about the union leaders as "labor misleaders," or
about the idiocy of the masses in buying television sets. This does not
mean that our culture has found great meanings yet, but it does
mean we are clearing away the jungle-growths of misconception and
