The New Dealer Shows Through

Adolf A. Berle Jr. is a unique phenomenon: he managed to stay with Franklin D. Roosevelt to the end (with a sabbatical spent in the entourage of Fiorello La Guardia), yet he never succumbed to the notion that a nation’s progress is to be measured by the operations of Parkinson’s Law. When Roosevelt was ringing the changes on the theme of the “money-changers” and the “economic royalists,” Berlehstened in silence. Once back in private life after 1946, however, he proceeded to come up with some theses that have sorely tried his old ADA friends. Along with David Lilienthal of TVA fame he decided that corporations were not monsters. On the contrary, he said, they were quite definitely prone to consult the “public consensus”; indeed, they had developed a “corporate conscience.”

Having shocked his friends, it might be supposed that Berle had necessarily put himself in a position to please his old enemies. Reading his latest book, Power Without Property (Harcourt, Brace, $3.75), however, one is chiefly impressed with Berle’s refusal to press his thinking home. It is not that this book is bad or without interest, or lacking in elegance and verve. Berle is original in his arrangement of perspectives, and he writes with both pungency and grace. But the New Dealer in him always triumphs in moments of ultimate showdown: he can’t bring himself to say that the “market” is a more efficient and humane judge of activity than a group of intellectuals devoted to the Galbraithian notions that a “social budget” must be “planned.”

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Adolf A. Berle Jr. is a unique phenomenon: he managed to stay with Franklin D. Roosevelt to the end (with a sabbatical spent in the entourage of Fiorello La Guardia), yet he never succumbed to the notion that a nation’s progress is to be measured by the operations of Parkinson’s Law. When Roosevelt was ringing the changes on the theme of the “money-changers” and the “economic royalists,” Berlehstened in silence. Once back in private life after 1946, however, he proceeded to come up with some theses that have sorely tried his old ADA friends. Along with David Lilienthal of TVA fame he decided that corporations were not monsters. On the contrary, he said, they were quite definitely prone to consult the “public consensus”; indeed, they had developed a “corporate conscience.”

Having shocked his friends, it might be supposed that Berle had necessarily put himself in a position to please his old enemies. Reading his latest book, Power Without Property (Harcourt, Brace, $3.75), however, one is chiefly impressed with Berle’s refusal to press his thinking home. It is not that this book is bad or without interest, or lacking in elegance and verve. Berle is original in his arrangement of perspectives, and he writes with both pungency and grace. But the New Dealer in him always triumphs in moments of ultimate showdown: he can’t bring himself to say that the “market” is a more efficient and humane judge of activity than a group of intellectuals devoted to the Galbraithian notions that a “social budget” must be “planned.”