A Major Windfall

This reviewer thought he knew what this book (Freedom Con temporary Society by Samuel Eliot Morison, Little, Brown, $3.50) was going to say before he read a word of it. The author is Professor Emeritus of American History at Harvard, the former collaborator of Henry Steele Commager, and the World War Two historian of the stuffiest and most respectable branch of our armed services. He is, in a word, a man not renowned for the fusses he has kicked up with the Estabhshment, and not likely, therefore, in writing on political, economic, and academic freedom, to rise above what might be called the Zechariah Chafee level of penetration and originality.

And sure enough, Admiral Morison talks of our “great peril,” of our liberties that are about to be subverted “at the hands of foolish and wicked Americans—by whom I do not mean those commonly called ‘fellow travelers.’” He refers to that “obscene” phenomenon known as McCarthyism. The TVA, we learn under the topic of “Economic Freedom,” is the “greatest constructive and permanent achievement of the New Deal,” and the latter, let there be no question about it, “saved the capitalist system … and democratic government as well.” The Great Depression “discredited laissez faire, a resort to which, now, is even less likely than a return to neolithic civilization following an atomic war” —which seems to put the familiar relax-and-enjoy-statism theme as forcefully as the Establishment could wish. And on “academic freedom” we hear, as we expected to, about those “frightened conservatives” who are attacking our colleges as centers of Communism.

WK

About the Author

Willmoore Kendall

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This reviewer thought he knew what this book (Freedom Con temporary Society by Samuel Eliot Morison, Little, Brown, $3.50) was going to say before he read a word of it. The author is Professor Emeritus of American History at Harvard, the former collaborator of Henry Steele Commager, and the World War Two historian of the stuffiest and most respectable branch of our armed services. He is, in a word, a man not renowned for the fusses he has kicked up with the Estabhshment, and not likely, therefore, in writing on political, economic, and academic freedom, to rise above what might be called the Zechariah Chafee level of penetration and originality.

And sure enough, Admiral Morison talks of our “great peril,” of our liberties that are about to be subverted “at the hands of foolish and wicked Americans—by whom I do not mean those commonly called ‘fellow travelers.’” He refers to that “obscene” phenomenon known as McCarthyism. The TVA, we learn under the topic of “Economic Freedom,” is the “greatest constructive and permanent achievement of the New Deal,” and the latter, let there be no question about it, “saved the capitalist system … and democratic government as well.” The Great Depression “discredited laissez faire, a resort to which, now, is even less likely than a return to neolithic civilization following an atomic war” —which seems to put the familiar relax-and-enjoy-statism theme as forcefully as the Establishment could wish. And on “academic freedom” we hear, as we expected to, about those “frightened conservatives” who are attacking our colleges as centers of Communism.