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It is Later than You Think: 1989 Max Lerner

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rhen a first book has survived half a century its author may be forgiven a few memories, ref l e c t i o n s - a n d second thoughts. In 1938, a little more than a year into Franklin Roosevelt's second term, and almost three years after Hitler sent his troops into Rhineland, I produced a strange threelegged creature, the book It Is Later Than You Think. It was a broadside against a dinosaur Right at home, an expansionist facism abroad, and a passive classical liberalism that had proved feckless in fighting either. I meant it as a tract for the time, a manifesto intended to animate a moribund New Deal by challenging it to shape a more coherent philosophy. I saw the Left as confused and "in retreat," both in America and Europe, and I meant to stir it into rethinking its intellectual base. It was too ambitious an undertaking. I wrote as a liberal, but as a disabused one, feeling that a new brand of liberalism was possible with more resolve, more gut realism and intellectual gaiety than I saw around me. My chase had a beast in view. No camp at the time--Left, Right, or liberal--had faced up to the charnel-house quality of fascism, a creed that had borrowed elements of its thinking and strategy from the Western societies and had turned them into a lethal concoction.

My direct concern was domestic, but I found FDR's foreign policy wretchedly improvised and ambivalent. The Left had talked of "collective security" and indeed adopted it as a battle-cry. But I wanted action in place of words. ! felt that only a concerted c o m m o n effort against Hitler could still prevent World War II and give the internal strategies of democracy a chance to shape up and prevail. This was my obsessive enterprise. Beyond the fagades of capitalism and anticapitalism, liberalism and conservatism, the vital force for me was democracy. It was a young book, but I was no longer so young. I had been through the boom 1920s, the Great Depression, the seductions of the Left. I was weary of the parochial Left-liberal battles. For me the current to swim in was democracy. We had too long done it the indignity of taking it for granted, and had not begun to explore its capacity for surprising us. Although my metaphors were mostly military, I came to it with the fresh and avid eyes of a lover. I wooed democracy as one of her soldiers--less a liberal than a democrat with a small d. Thoroughly rethought and revitalized, I felt confident that such a democracy could transform the world. A half-century has elapsed, with a world war and

84 / SOCIETY 9 SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 1989 a host of other wars, with cultural revolutions and cold wars and d6tentes. It has taken that long for the democratic idea--with the passion behind i t - - t o exert its true world force, a force witnessed in these later 1980s when no nation is immune to it. With a good part of my generation, I was straining for a principle that turned out to have a design of its own, stretching beyond the farthest reach of our hopes. We were puny figures on its margins. It was, I suspect, this magnetic force of democracy that gave the book its cohesion and accounted for its impact. Because the force it celebrates is still the center of my being. I take pleasure at the continuities of the half-century. With all the book's frailties, I do not feel that history has wholly overtaken it. As I have suggested, it was a young man's book, although I wrote it at the advanced age of thirtyfive, when one should have outlived his early naivet6s and zeals. As a first book it was brash, with a too-imperious style, a raw energy, and a succession

of staccato sentences more confident than I should venture now. As first authors do, I crowded into it everything I knew. I have since unlearned a number of things in it that I thought I knew. Yet after a half-century and its gaggle of books, I would feel lucky if I could give an account of my present political and moral universe with as much barely restrained passion as this first, too self-confident book of mine possessed.

Second Thoughts The book has, in perspective, a calendar of sins to answer for. There are ideas and positions in it that simply have not stood the test of time: for example, my plumping for a "Popular Front," by which I meant the cooperation of Labor with elements of the communist Left until it could form its own Labor party. That I wrote it at the height of the Spanish war, when most of us hoped for a Popular Front victory, may explain, but not justify, the idiocy of embracing a slogan so useful to the communists. (I

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IT IS LATER THAN YOU THINK / 85

had seen enough of them, and at fairly close range, to know how treacherous they were--in America as in Spain.) In a review article in Partisan Review, Sidney Hook charged that the Popular Front furnished the "rationale" of the book, I cannot agree. It was simply a bad idea, and the rest of the book would stand up without that section, probably improved by the omission. I am somewhat chastened about my zeal for "planning" as a phase of"democratic collectivism?' It flowed from the prevailing view that the Great Depression--and the 1937 New Deal recession-augured a future collapse of capitalism if planning imperatives were not met. The collapse did not

If I had to do it over again, I would tilt the book's emphasis from "democratic collectivism" to "collective security." come. I was naive in believing that "socialist" planning in Russia was effective, and blind to its staggering human costs, not fully revealed until later. In our own time it is communism that has had to begin adopting the information technologies and open-market strategies of capitalism in order to stave off economic and political collapse. It is communism, not capitalist democracy, whose ideological acceptance is ebbing fast. In the 1943 edition, I tried to make amends. I noted that after the war experience, Keynesian fiscal controls, rather than planning, might achieve the desired economic goals. Judging by the reviews, my section on the "Six Errors of Marxism" had some impact. I was a democrat, not a socialist, and I wanted to say why. The reader will note my recital of the errors: the underestimate of the strength of capitalism, the overestimate of the proletariat as revolutionary, the misreckoning of the strength and direction of the middle class, the refusal to understand that nationalism is "the most powerful emotional force in modern history," the lack of a Marxist political "depth psychology," the permission granted by Marxist theory for the inhuman exercise of power in the name of the "dictatorship of the proletariat?' I should have heeded the first two of the errors better myself, since the book was vulnerable on them. But on the whole these weaknesses of Marxist thought are as operative today as they were in 1938. (The New Masses, then an influential communist weekly, responded with a hostile review titled "The Six Errors of Max Lerner." At least the book had drawn blood.) The starker disillusionments of Popular Front lib-

erals came several years after the book's publication, with the Nazi-Soviet pact. It led a scattering of Left intellectuals, including myself, to seek a new political grouping of our own. We called it the Independent Left. The book may have served as a rallying point for a series of discussions in several cities, on how to stay Left but remain independent of parties. Not surprisingly the movement got nowhere. It is easy to forget that in the late 1930s communism was not the enemy. Nazism was, as was appeasement of the fascist dictators, isolationism in the face of their expansion, and the spinelessness of the democracies. My tract for the times, in its broader analytical framework, sought to confront those enemies. The heart of it was a theory of democracy and power, and the balancing within it of majorities and minorities. My most impassioned chapters cluster around this theme. I found in democracy a strong theory of government, replete with paradoxes, yet capable of resolving them. Its majority will could accommodate minority rights because a democracy needs a competition of ideas to give that will a base in a considered and examined life of the mind. "Civil Liberties for All" was the way I put it. This also allowed for the expression of the felt needs of interest groups as part of the majority process. But I had little truck with the absolutisms of single-issue pressure groups, Left or Right, which fragment and polarize a society. Accordingly, a constitutional theory, I opposed the conservative activism of the pre-Roosevelt court. The observant reader will note the support I gave at the time to FDR's court-packing plan. I saw it as an act of daring executive supremacy to c o u n t e r - and overcome--the judicial supremacy of a hostile court. I would not take that position today, since it played too dangerously with the structure of judicial independence. Yet in the end both the executive threat implied in the plan, and the congressional rebuke administered to the president, established a new equilibrium of the three branches, and preserved the majority-minority balance. I add that I have continued to oppose the liberal activism of the Warren court and its continuing influence on its successors.

From "Democratic Collectivism" to "Collective Security" All thinking is tested by time and history. There were five years between my original edition and my new pages, which I wrote in 1942, the year in which the war turned and we sensed we could have a future. The intervening years had not only tested but tempered my thinking. Writing in 1937--with more prescience than I could have w i s h e d - - I said that "the war seems scarcely avoidable," and I added, "If war comes

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within the next two years it will throw out of focus much of the analysis of the internal democratic tactic that I present?' The war did come nearly two years later. America joined it two years after that. And I have to add, ruefully, that the war did in truth "throw out of focus" the militant domestic tactic I had outlined, in particular the too-optimistic "agenda for a democratic collectivism" In retrospect, if I had to do it over again, I would tilt the book's emphasis from "democratic collectivism" to "collective security." With all of FDR's skills and insights in domestic policy, we now see that his foreign policy was fatally ambivalent and vacillating. In the 1936 election, he ran against the utility barons when he should have run against Hitler, who had amply shown by that time that his regime "had to expand or die?'

Impending War In the summer of 1938 I sent galleys of my book to Tom Corcoran, FDR's close lieutenant, who told me with some elation that the president had read the crucial passages he had marked for him, on war and peace as well as the New Deal. I was no Machiavelli, but in some ways I had written the book for my Prince. A writer hopes, when he addresses power, that his prince will heed him. I never knew whether he did or not. But if FDR meant what he said in the 1940 campaign, that he would not send a single soldier to Europe, he should have started to shore up the European democracies and gear up an American a r m a m e n t e c o n o m y m u c h earlier, at t h e t i m e o f t h e Kristallnacht and the Rhineland invasion. By the time he said it, it was already too late to be honest or true. My sections on the enemy America was reluctant to face, and on the impending war, were thought by some of my critics to be alarmist. As it turned out, they were not alarmist enough, nor did I spell them out with enough fullness. Roosevelt had tested the waters in 1937 with his interventionist speech in Chicago, when there was still time to take a stand for collective action that could throw a cordon sanitaire around Hitler and thus prevent the war. But he withdrew quickly at the first sign of isolationist opposition. In the end he made up for it. Once America threw its industrial strength into the w a r - - m u c h too late--he acted as an impressive c o m m a n d e r o f the entire war coalition. Writing in 1938 1 should have known that in "the house of fascist thought" there was no room for the survival of Europe's Jews and other innocents. But how could I have known, even in 1942 and 1943, that there was no room in FDR's war plans for

bombing Hitler's h u m a n death factories out of their ghoulish functioning, nor for offering the refugee survivors a mass haven? I had joined a group that tried to influence American opinion and policy for the rescue of Hitler's victims. All through the early 1940s we sent repeated pleas to the president and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. I was not prepared to understand how abandoned the Holocaust victims would be, even by FDR, for "reasons of state." It was late than either of us thought.

Fifty Years Later A word about the intervening decades: I recognized then, as I do now, that the tragic is part of the constitution of human life. In the 1960s America fashioned a Great Society that was not so great, a cultural revolution that did little for the culture, and a Vietnam War that was fought almost as much at home as in Asia. In the early 1970s it experienced Watergate, and in the late 1980s the Iran-Contra adventure. America has survived all of them, although it has not clearly profited from their lessons. It has even survived an era of overkill weapons and has caught a glimpse of a future in which they may possibly be controlled with a measure of wisdom. In many ways I am not today the man who wrote the book. But while the hobgoblin of consistency is not one of my favorite demons, I do care about the intellectual continuities that a writer establishes in the course of a lifetime, along with the necessary changes. I find enough continuities to recognize myself over the chasm of a half-century in this book of my young manhood.After fifty years, and after a perverse mixture of heroisms and blindness, tragedies and farces, America remains for me (as it was for Thomas Wolfe) "the only fabulous country." For the recent influx of immigrants, and for all who still long to come to its shores, it retains the mythic outlines of wonder. It retains them for me as well, an immigrant of the first decade of the century. As I revisit the America of my first young book, I hail it with r e c o g n i t i o n , a n d am r e l u c t a n t to bid it farewell. []

Max Lerner is a nationally syndicated column&t for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Post. Now in his eighties, he is author of America as a Civilization; It Is Later Than You Think; Ideas Are Weapons; and Values in Education. He has edited major works on Thorstein Veblen, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Alexis de Tocqeville. Dr. Lerner served on the social science faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, Williams College, and Harvard University, and later became professor of American civilization at Brandeis University.