CHAPTER II THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

The present unrest in America, differing from unrest on other occasions in this and other countries, is not a religious issue. There is no conflict between the Church and the State. It is not a moral issue, at least in the broad sense. The chief public concern is not about prohibition, the gaming tables, Sunday baseball or individual immorality. Nor basically, is it a political issue, although it is rapidly becoming one.

The issue is one of an economic character. The people are not uneasy because they desire more religion, better morals or a different political system. They are uneasy because the desire for goods and services, for material things, for wealth, so notoriously exceeds their satisfactions. Many politicians promise more economic satisfactions under a different political order. If they, the people, can be made to believe this, then a different political order is inevitable, whether or not eventually it will increase satisfactions. Merely make ’em believe it!

This desire, fanned into a white heat, encouraged by demagogues who have mistaken their neuroses for mentality, will take almost any avenue that promises satisfaction. It is a safe wager if a new religion came along promising economic bounty, that it would get tens of thousands of clamoring converts. And some churchmen are obviously aware of this fact. Witness the church support given consumer cooperatives.

The fact that more desires are more nearly fulfilled in this country, even under our present strained conditions, than any other country at any other time, offers little solace and in no fashion tends to temper this headlong rush for more things for more people.

Unearthing the exact reasons for this unprecedented insatiability is not so easy. For one thing, human desires are unlimited. Kings, centuries ago, lived in a squalor, a filth hard to imagine today. Our poor do not, nor would we have them, seek satisfaction by such ugly comparisons. Rather they compare their position with their contemporaries better provisioned. Discontent, arising from, this cause, will be eternally evident for there is no system that ever has or ever will give material equality.

No discussion of this subject would be complete without at least quoting from Ortega y Gasset’s excellent work, “The Revolt of the Masses”:[1]

“. . . The world which surrounds the new man from his birth does not compel him to limit himself in any fashion, it sets up no veto in opposition to him, on the contrary, it incites his appetite, which in principle can increase indefinitely. Now it turns out—and this is most important, that this world of the XIXth and early XXth centuries not only has the perfections and the completeness which it actually possesses, but furthermore suggests to those who dwell in it the radical assurance that tomorrow it will be still richer, ampler, more perfect, as if it enjoyed a spontaneous, inexhaustible power of increase. Even today, in spite of some signs which are making a tiny breach in that faith, even today, there are few men who doubt that motor cars will in five years’ time be more comfortable and cheaper than today. They believe in this as they believe the sun will rise in the morning. The metaphor is an exact one. For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.”

Certainly, the voice of the demagogue, who depends for his political ascendency upon existing discontent, or discontent he can create, has reached the ears of millions through the radio. In pre-radio days that type of person got little more than soapbox hearing, principally because he, with his nitwit ideas could never make enough money to get himself beyond city parks. In those days the man who couldn’t look after himself had little chance of promising many others how well he could look after them. But today, if he doesn’t get free time on the air, his followers will ante enough two-bit pieces to assure the American public of his Messianic message. The radio has brought many blessings to many people, but assuredly it has made a long-standing chronic problem a most acute one.

No doubt the motion picture is the radio’s able ally. Here again, millions, day in and day out, perhaps on a bare subsistence level, seat themselves in comfortable palaces and gaze at wealth unbounded, at extravagant luxury, at playboys and playgirls in security. What man, even in the ten-thousand-dollar class, has not come away from the cinema with a deep-seated yearning for something common sense dictates is beyond his grasp? What then about the man with a family—a man without a job? For two hours he rides the magic carpet, he is the hero in all his glory—momentarily happy. Time comes to leave this “Aladdin’s Wonder.” He walks from there into the world of stark reality. The contrast is appalling. He will have the things he wants and turns to the quack with the most glowing promises. Is it any wonder there exists such an unaccomplishable distance between desire and realization?

Yet, in the final analysis, these scientific achievements, the radio and the motion picture, modern transportation and many others for that matter, are blessings in disguise, even in respect to this problem of excessive desires. They have aggravated and therefore brought into better perspective an ailment we had with us anyway. They have assisted in bringing into the crisis stage a lingering economic sickness. This crisis stage should stimulate the better minds to consultation. The quacks may lose their lucrative practice. Some of the better citizens may be jarred from their confounded apathy—they may realize, once again, that the price of liberty, of individual rights, of representative government, is eternal vigilance. They may discard with the relics of intoxicated days that nit-witticism, “Let George Do It.”

While no economic system is possible or perhaps desirable that will completely satisfy all the desires of everyone, competent and incompetent alike, it is an obvious fact that we are flagrantly inferior to our potential achievements. And it is equally obvious that present trends are taking us deeper and deeper into the morass of national difficulty.

A national well-being could not help result from a proper mixture of a friendly climate, a productive soil, an abundance of natural and labor resources and human intelligence. Nature has been kind-more than generous—for we have the climate, the soil and the resources. The deficiency then, must be intelligence. It is a damning indictment that there should ever be prolonged want on the part of willing and able-bodied workers amid such favorable conditions. The price of stupidity and apathy is indeed high.

It was stated earlier that on occasion we had been “warm” in tagging the agelong objective of plenty, but that there never has been any unanimity of opinion as to the method of approach.

Were we not “warm” some years ago when a commission of Europeans came to this country to study our conditions? Here are some of the findings of that commission:

1. Seven per cent of the people in the whole world living in the United States under the American plan had more purchasing power than all of Europe.

2. This little group has created and owned more than half the wealth of the world.

3. From only 6 per cent of the world’s acreage we harvested more than half of the world’s foodstuffs.

4. We have half of the world’s communicating facilities.

5. We have nearly half the world’s railway and electric energy.

6. We produce 92 per cent of the world’s automobiles.

7. We have 22,000,000 automobiles in use that run over 600,000 miles of paved road.

8. This little 7 per cent of the world’s population enjoyed standards of living which enabled them to consume:

a. Half the world’s coffee.

b. Half the world’s rubber.

c. Three-fourths the world’s silk.

d. One-third the world’s coal.

e. Two-thirds the world’s crude oil.

Is it not possible that there is some factor in our system that is responsible for this approach to a national plenty? Perhaps we think it is one thing when it really is something none of us identify. What is this “X” factor, this mystery factor? Is not a search for it advisable? Would not that be preferable to tossing the whole system out the window and substituting for it some foreign system, in which perhaps this “X” factor cannot possibly exist? It is quite evident the Europeans came here to discover the “X” factor, but it is equally evident that they went away with a lot of statistics of our wealth, which is about all most of us know about it.

The main purpose of this thesis will be to restate the “X” factor. It is no secret. It has been explained and re-explained but perhaps not in a grammar that caught the imagination. People interested in the problem have gone right by it, trying to find a complicated solution.

Our picture today is something like this:

We have an abundance of investment money but what power can force business to use it unless business can sell the goods it would produce?

We have fine instruments of production—factories and farms—but why produce something that will not be bought?

We have millions of able people out of work and seeking employment but can anyone hire them to produce goods for which there is no market?

We have a wealth of natural resources, but again there is no market for their harvesting.

We have millions of people who need goods but they have no purchasing power.

There is our problem—“Impoverishment in the Midst of Plenty.” All of the instruments for the solution are available. What is the key to the puzzle? What is the “X” factor?

The forces of discontent, the radicals who are trying to change completely or seriously modify our social and economic order, are by no means confined to the impoverished. Nor are the impoverished, by any means, all in radical groupings. People in those groupings have a wide variety of incentives for their position:

Those who feel they can gain power superior to what they now possess by identifying themselves as friends of the poor.

Those who sincerely sympathize with the needy but have only fuzzy ideas of the remedial measures to be taken.

Those who, in the $250, $500 or $1000 monthly income class, feel that the present order does not sufficiently reward their abilities.

Those who have developed a passionate fetish for some form of socialism or other European ism or, in short, the Totalitarian State.

Those who feel that the laws of nature, of economics, of competition are cruel and inhuman and that they can devise an order that is better than that of the universe.

Finally,

Those who are really impoverished—who feel that any change, irrespective of its character, can do them no harm. They have, they think, everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Needless to relate, the last grouping serves as the nucleus around which the others build their case. It is the larder from which they get their emotional sustenance. It is the ember from which their fire is fanned. Impoverishment, in toto, can never be removed. Too many factors, other than economic behavior, have partial control. But the economic barriers can be removed; that is, it is scientifically possible. Once removed, impoverishment will be so inconsiderable that the forces of discontent[2] should go the way of the swarming locust when the sources favorable to breeding no longer exist.

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[1] W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., New York.

[2] This statement requires some qualification. Material discontent, is caused by the lag between growing desires and supplied satisfactions. Discontent could conceivably get seriously worse under the most rampant prosperity, that is, should desires expand more rapidly than the prosperity. Many long periods among many poverty-stricken peoples have witnessed far less discontent than one observes in America today.