Books in Brief

The Washington Embrace of Business, by Roger M. Blough (Carnegie Press, 162 pp., $8.95). Roger Blough has been honorably engaged for nearly forty years in U.S. Steel’s top management and in its government-relations struggles. However, most people unfairly remember him best as the latter-day robber baron he was made out to be by President Kennedy in his tantrum over the 1962 steel price increases. Now, in a small book based on three lectures he gave in 1974 in Carnegie-Mellon University’s Benjamin Fairless Memorial series, the long-suffering Mr. Blough has his say on that episode, and on the generic business-government tensions that it symbolized. His comments on the personally bruising 1962 attack from Camelot are sorrowful but philosophical, and generally work a vein as charitable as JFK’s was vindictive. There is a useful appendix containing comprehensive documentation on the (in retrospect) clearly moderate and justified price hike, its stormy consequences, and its coerced rollback. But the real value of the book is in Blough’s forceful argument that “it is high time for business to terminate its standoffish resentment toward Washington and its interference in business affairs [and to consider instead] the pragmatic direction of business moving toward a more cooperative attitude with government, a shared-responsibility type of approach.” Is this another step toward the quasi-fascist economy recently warned of by Charlotte Twight in her book, America’s Emerging Fascist Economy? Not at all—for the accommodation envisioned by this veteran steelman and lawyer involves only tactical give by the business community toward government, with the resulting closer dialogue actually leading to a Congress and Executive Branch better educated about market imperatives and more supportive of decentralized economic management. Far from caving in to politically motivated interventionism such as Kennedy’s in April 1962 or Nixon’s in August 1971, Blough looks to a day when a more aggressive and sophisticated business activism in Washington will have persuaded national leaders that “good economics must necessarily be good politics over any reasonable span of time.” With a populist Democrat now apparently riding high toward the White House, this is must reading for partisans of free enterprise, or what’s left of it. JOHN K. ANDREWS JR.

The Day the Laughter Stopped, by David Yallop (St. Martin’s, 358 pp., $12.50). In England, watching a “Fatty” Arbuckle movie is a crime, even now, even 55 years after the world’s then most popular film star was acquitted in a case charging him with the murder of one Virginia Rappe. In 1975 a perfectly dreadful film, The Wild Party, capitalized on the half-century-old scandal by depicting an orgiastic bash at a Hollywood biggie’s pad, at which party a starlet died; the ads for this bit of cinema trash coyly related it to the Arbuckle affair, thus revitalizing the elaborate series of lies that ruined a great man’s majestic career. In a commendable exercise in historical revisionism —incredibly enough, the first serious attempt to set the record straight—British film writer David Yallop explores the virtually chaste career of Roscoe Arbuckle and shows, beyond a reasonable shadow of doubt, that the lovable fat man was entirely innocent of the charges leveled against him; entirely the victim of a Hearst and vigilante-inspired campaign to discredit him; entirely ruined in 1921 despite his acquittal, when he was deserted by most of his friends and subjected to the absurd censorship machine of the new Hays office. Arbuckle’s was another of those true rags-to-riches stories, a bloated Horatio Alger tale, and the joy this gentle, decent, simple (but brilliant) man gave the world made his contrived fall the more unjust. “Fatty,” ashamed of his unlovely physique, shied from physical intimacy with women; even his wives commented later, as then, upon his modesty. He was no more a rapist and murderer than was the victim a newborn innocent. Stonyfaced women who haunted the courts, clamoring for blood, more blood, condemned him before the jury had heard a word of evidence; and the timidity and hypocrisy of his own Hollywood confrères —with the notable exception of a few stalwarts, like Buster Keaton—left him to be destroyed by an enraged nation, which had been his adoring audience of tens of millions. A horrifying story, perhaps just a bit too energetically told; a “filthy, revolting affair,” as one contemporary called the party at which Virginia Rappe died— mistakenly, for the description far better fit the witch-hunt itself.

JA

About the Author

John K. Andrews Jr.

DB

About the Author

David Brudnoy

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The Washington Embrace of Business, by Roger M. Blough (Carnegie Press, 162 pp., $8.95). Roger Blough has been honorably engaged for nearly forty years in U.S. Steel’s top management and in its government-relations struggles. However, most people unfairly remember him best as the latter-day robber baron he was made out to be by President Kennedy in his tantrum over the 1962 steel price increases. Now, in a small book based on three lectures he gave in 1974 in Carnegie-Mellon University’s Benjamin Fairless Memorial series, the long-suffering Mr. Blough has his say on that episode, and on the generic business-government tensions that it symbolized. His comments on the personally bruising 1962 attack from Camelot are sorrowful but philosophical, and generally work a vein as charitable as JFK’s was vindictive. There is a useful appendix containing comprehensive documentation on the (in retrospect) clearly moderate and justified price hike, its stormy consequences, and its coerced rollback. But the real value of the book is in Blough’s forceful argument that “it is high time for business to terminate its standoffish resentment toward Washington and its interference in business affairs [and to consider instead] the pragmatic direction of business moving toward a more cooperative attitude with government, a shared-responsibility type of approach.” Is this another step toward the quasi-fascist economy recently warned of by Charlotte Twight in her book, America’s Emerging Fascist Economy? Not at all—for the accommodation envisioned by this veteran steelman and lawyer involves only tactical give by the business community toward government, with the resulting closer dialogue actually leading to a Congress and Executive Branch better educated about market imperatives and more supportive of decentralized economic management. Far from caving in to politically motivated interventionism such as Kennedy’s in April 1962 or Nixon’s in August 1971, Blough looks to a day when a more aggressive and sophisticated business activism in Washington will have persuaded national leaders that “good economics must necessarily be good politics over any reasonable span of time.” With a populist Democrat now apparently riding high toward the White House, this is must reading for partisans of free enterprise, or what’s left of it. JOHN K. ANDREWS JR.

The Day the Laughter Stopped, by David Yallop (St. Martin’s, 358 pp., $12.50). In England, watching a “Fatty” Arbuckle movie is a crime, even now, even 55 years after the world’s then most popular film star was acquitted in a case charging him with the murder of one Virginia Rappe. In 1975 a perfectly dreadful film, The Wild Party, capitalized on the half-century-old scandal by depicting an orgiastic bash at a Hollywood biggie’s pad, at which party a starlet died; the ads for this bit of cinema trash coyly related it to the Arbuckle affair, thus revitalizing the elaborate series of lies that ruined a great man’s majestic career. In a commendable exercise in historical revisionism —incredibly enough, the first serious attempt to set the record straight—British film writer David Yallop explores the virtually chaste career of Roscoe Arbuckle and shows, beyond a reasonable shadow of doubt, that the lovable fat man was entirely innocent of the charges leveled against him; entirely the victim of a Hearst and vigilante-inspired campaign to discredit him; entirely ruined in 1921 despite his acquittal, when he was deserted by most of his friends and subjected to the absurd censorship machine of the new Hays office. Arbuckle’s was another of those true rags-to-riches stories, a bloated Horatio Alger tale, and the joy this gentle, decent, simple (but brilliant) man gave the world made his contrived fall the more unjust. “Fatty,” ashamed of his unlovely physique, shied from physical intimacy with women; even his wives commented later, as then, upon his modesty. He was no more a rapist and murderer than was the victim a newborn innocent. Stonyfaced women who haunted the courts, clamoring for blood, more blood, condemned him before the jury had heard a word of evidence; and the timidity and hypocrisy of his own Hollywood confrères —with the notable exception of a few stalwarts, like Buster Keaton—left him to be destroyed by an enraged nation, which had been his adoring audience of tens of millions. A horrifying story, perhaps just a bit too energetically told; a “filthy, revolting affair,” as one contemporary called the party at which Virginia Rappe died— mistakenly, for the description far better fit the witch-hunt itself.