Against Decadence:
The Work of Robert A. Brady (1901–63)

by Doug Dowd

Journal of Economic Issues –Vol. XXVIII No. 4, Dec. 1994

The author is Professorial Lecturer in International Economics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna Center. He wishes to express his gratitude to Judith and Joan Brady and to Professor Edward S. Herman for their friendly and indispensable assistance.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Thorstein Veblen described social evolution as a race between the life-giving and the life-destroying, between the cooperative and the predatory elements in human nature and society. He was essentially pessimistic, expecting that "force and fraud" rather than solidarity and reason would win out: economic progress had been so spectacular that human beings would self-destructively "play fast and loose" with the fundamental conditions of survival as a species in nature, instead of living and working constructively with its imperatives and possibilities.¹

This memoir concerns the economist Robert A. Brady. He knew Veblen and took as his own point of departure Veblen's principal work: especially The Theory of Business Enterprise, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, The Instinct of Workmanship, and Absentee Ownership. Always consistent with, and always going beyond Veblen, Brady organized and pursued his own analyses around the main themes emphasized by Veblen: technology, social — especially business — power, the nature of our species, irrationality and the grip of the past upon the present, and both more gloomily and more hopefully than Veblen, the lingering bases for a future less calamitous than our past.

What follows seeks to honor and to revive interest in the work of this virtually forgotten economist — at the same time that, in his spirit, it is also a call for a renovation of what has too long been and is increasingly becoming a decadent profession.

By 1929 (the year he received his Ph.D. at Columbia), Brady had begun to illuminate the whys and wherefores of the ruinous path the most "civilized" nations were trodding. He was expressing his own deepest belief in 1937 when, using Lear as his voice, he warned (on the title page of his The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism):

If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offences
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep²

The Elements of Brady's Personal and Professional History

Brady was born on the social, as well as the geographic, outer edge of the United States (in Marysville, Washington) as the century began, and, like Veblen, he was born and grew up on a farm. That was only one of the many similarities between the two men; however, the differences in their personal backgrounds were considerably more important. Veblen's father was on the frontier of scientific farming and a cultivated person; and the peculiarities of the Veblen family weighed in on the positive side.³

Brady's father, in sharp contrast, was in fact enslaved, purchased by a brutalizing farmer in the Midwest as a "boughten boy" for $15 when he was four. He was in captivity — often beaten and chained, always badly mistreated — until, at the age of 16, he escaped.⁴ Because Brady's father had been forcibly kept from education as a child but subsequently managed to become educated, education was an important standard in the Brady family — whatever else in the way of familial or material well-being may have been lacking.

Because of and despite his harsh childhood, Brady became unusually strong and disciplined, both mentally and physically. He was a hard taskmaster — first for himself, and then (helpfully and often generously) for those who worked with him. Brady worked his way into and through college. He did his undergraduate studies in Oregon at Reed College — then as now seen as among the most liberal of liberal arts colleges. It will not have escaped the readers of this journal that Brady, like Veblen, was an "outsider"; both men were noticeably influenced by the populism and rural radicalism of their times and places, at the same time that each developed sophisticated analyses that went well beyond the roots of their inspiration.

It is also noteworthy that both Veblen and Brady were well acquainted with and friendly critics of the corpus of Marxism; but neither Marxian accumulation theory nor its implications were incorporated into their own analyses. Also, although clearly and strongly anticapitalist in analysis and outlook, their political goals were toward industrial democracy, or workers' control, or, as it was termed early in this century, "guild socialism," rather than the more centralized forms of socialism normally supported by Marxists.

The analytical emphasis of both Veblen and Brady, taking exploitation for granted, was on the socioeconomic power of business, with its source the control over property (the means of production), rather than, as in Marx, on "accumulation! accumulation!" with its focus on capital.⁵ Thus, although both Veblen and Brady were unusually well acquainted with European history and culture, their analyses and politics may be sharply distinguished from those of European critics of capitalism; they (along with C. Wright Mills) should be seen instead as the most analytical and radical of those extending the traditions of U.S. populism.⁶

Brady began his graduate work at Cornell (where Veblen had also studied economics) and went on to Columbia for his Ph.D. He had been exposed to Veblen's thought all along the way, most systematically at Columbia, where he worked closely with J. M. Clark.⁷ He taught at New York University for two years while completing his dissertation and then, in 1929, joined the faculty at Berkeley, where he ended his professional career.⁸

All who knew Brady, whether as his student, colleague, reader, or friend — and I was fortunate enough to know him in all those ways — knew him as an intensely political person. When it was appropriate, his politics were upfront; but most of his work came as close to what is normally meant by "scientific" as one is likely to find in social analysis: he was almost religiously objective, determinedly, extraordinarily, and voraciously well informed, and, except as a critic, he consciously distanced himself from ideological positions; but he was never neutral.

Brady's principal courses were European economic history, history of economic thought, and economic planning. In the classroom, he was insistently historical, always linking logic and fact within an evolutionary analysis. In the opening lecture of his undergraduate course in economic history, he said that historical understanding is the sine qua non of social understanding. Fine. But understanding of what history, when, where, and why? Should one choose to study France in the eighteenth century? And if so, how does one decide between a description and an analysis of Voltaire's laundry tags, rather than the processes leading to the French Revolution? Or should something else entirely be chosen? Is there a theory of history that enables one to choose? How does one choose the theory of history? And so it went, our pens and pencils working madly as Brady demanded that we stop taking notes and think!⁹ On the graduate level, his standards were more complex, and one was led to understand that to be thus involved was a privilege and therefore a responsibility: game players apply elsewhere.

The rest of this essay will concern the most important of Brady's publications, as noted in the References. The works will be discussed in terms of their substantive focus, rather than chronologically. What follows falls into six sections, concerned respectively with Brady's works on science and technology, the German attempt of the 1920s to utilize the latter maximally, the sociopolitical economy of capitalism and industrialization, German fascism, planning and democracy; the memoir will conclude with a brief examination of the relevance of Brady's work for our time.¹⁰

Science and Technology

In the opening pages of Organization [1961, 5], Brady quotes Veblen [1904, 16] where the latter speaks of "this concatenation of processes" that makes "the modern industrial system at large bear the character of a comprehensive, balanced mechanical process." The concatenation, the comprehensiveness, and balance are always present in Brady's analyses of modern industry, but he adds the chemical and the electronic to the mechanical (and deals with a considerably more advanced level of the mechanical).

As its title indicates, Brady's dissertation [1929] concentrated on what came to be one of his two most abiding concerns: the field of actual and potential relationships between technology and social organization. (The other major focus was on the terrible threats or untold beneficial possibilities emerging from those same relationships.) As a dissertation, this work was, of course, the narrowest of his several studies of the nature and the economic, political, and social implications of modern industrialism.

Both Planning [1950a] and Organization [1961] constitute persuasive briefs for social and economic planning as well as detailed compendia of the always-changing anatomy and physiology of modern technology and its dynamic relationships with science.

Brady begins Organization with the double-edged theme that characterized all his work in this area: …it is everywhere evident that the need for more comprehensive and scientifically minded organization has arisen, prompted by the very nature of the phenomenal advances made by science and technology. How to preserve the cultural dynamism-or, at least, to recover what it may have to offer of value to human life, while effecting the necessary minimum degree of effective organization of scientific and technological resources-is probably the most difficult problem of history…, rendered even more difficult by the built-in necessity of preserving the greatest possible capacity for change in science and technology themselves [p. x]. And he adds that, As far as academic halls are concerned, the conventional divisions of subjects into political science, economics, sociology, business administration, and history-not to mention psychology, anthropology, and possibly even much of philosophy-may now well be as obsolete as the medieval division into the trivium and quadrivium after the Renaissance, and as cumbersome in coping with the problems which now crowd upon scholars for solution [p. xi]. It is not possible here to convey the depth, the detail, and the scope of Organization (or his other books); so, in addition to the few excerpts and my own comments, chapter headings are listed to inform and to whet interest. In order, they are "Part I: Variables Which Condition Success": "Introduction: Characteristics of the Scientific Revolution in Industry," "The Handicap Race with Nature," "Science as the Key to Resource Innovation," and "The Delicate Moving Balance between Order and Innovation"; "Part II: The Sweep and Inner Logic of The New Industrial Order": "The Principles of Unitization in Mining," "Determinants and Prospects of Industrialized Agriculture," "The Chemical Revolution in the Materials Foundation of Industry," "The Permeation of Automation Processing," "The Problem of Inter-Media Traffic Unification," "Evolution of the Universal Energy Pool," "The Possible Impact on Goods Distribution," "Integration of Telecommunications Networks," and "Recapitulation and the First Sum of Consequences." Also, the book contained more than 40 pages of "Notes."

Organization is just under 500 closely packed pages, as are Rationalization and Planning. Taken separately or together, they constitute an intensive education on the realities of the modern industrial system — realities only vaguely familiar to most economists. That economists theorize grandly about a system concerning whose elements they are uneducated — perhaps, given current training, uneducable — was not the least of Brady's critiques of economic theory.¹¹

One of the remarkable qualities of economic theory (micro, macro, and trade) is that, except for the brief disturbance created by Keynes, the vocabulary, the methodology, the realities used by theory were established considerably more than a century ago, when everything — including an assumed-to-be unchanging human nature — was dramatically different from this century. This was a constant analytical irritation for Brady, which led him to emphasize the need for "rethinking." Something of his position is seen when he says, …with respect to method, social-science data are only in rare instances subject to commensuration. Most economic data cannot readily be categorized. We cannot devise a thoroughly defensible index of production for most individual commodities, let alone for a major industry or society as a whole …In the simpler cases where the data are relatively easy to categorize, as with costs and prices, the parameters are themselves as much, if indeed not more, functions of policies…than policies are of them….As Alfred Marshall recognized long ago, both human nature and human societies in the long run change to such an extent that principles and laws must change, too. The scientific revolution in industry has served, at times, to shrink the "long run" from centuries or decades to weeks or days [1961, 10-11]. This is what Veblen had in mind when he remarked, of institutions, that "whatever is, is wrong," and that "in the long run the outcome has always been shaped by the disturbing causes….The fault appears to lie in the unexampled shifty behavior of the latterday facts."¹²

As Brady closes his introductory chapter, which has emphasized “the seamless web” connecting all parts of the economy, and them with all of the society, he warns (neither for the first nor the last time): it does not follow that rational organization, as made possible and promoted by the inner logic of the new industrial revolution, will actually be carried out, or that if carried out it will yet be managed so as to be generally consonant with democratic institutions and the cultural values of Western society [1961, 26; emphasis in original]. And, as he passes from that to a brief consideration of the underdeveloped countries, he warns also that what applies as a set of extraordinarily complex organizational needs for the already industrialized countries does so with even greater force for those striving to become so-as do the dangers [1961, 32-37].

After pointing to the need for an interdependent “rethinking through” in both the social and the natural sciences, in which “the condition for the success of each is a large measure of success in the other,” Brady concludes Organization by writing: It is no longer an issue of “plan or no plan” that now confronts the great industrial nations. The facts of technological development have moved, along with a radical change in human aspirations, as though in some grand historical conspiracy to force the human hand-not in a few isolated spots, but everywhere. It is now a problem of plan or cumulative breakdown; plan on a wider basis, or a breakdown that will bring disaster to all [1961, 424].

Modern Industry under Control  —  Almost

It was his thesis work (doubtless inspired by Veblen and J. M. Clark), plus Veblen's provocative Imperial Germany, that led Brady to travel to Germany to study its “rationalization movement” of the 1920s; this in turn developed his concern with and understanding of the emergence and nature of German fascism.

The German economy discussed by Veblen in his Imperial Germany was (already by the end of the nineteenth century) clearly in the forefront of the union of science and technology so much emphasized by Brady: given its limited resource base and its race to catch up and pass Britain, it had to be. With the rationalization movement in place, Germany fused its advanced technology (especially in chemistry and synthetics, physics and electrical products and processes) with its unique and most advanced organization of the economy: “rationalization.”

In Rationalization, Brady sought to portray its main principles of operation, its main problems (economic, political, and cultural), and its prospects, to all of which we will soon return. A work of several years, Rationalization was published in the summer of the very year in which German capitalism, both because of and despite its ultramodern qualities, was done in by itself and the times and surrendered its power to the Nazis.

It is worth remembering that the focus of Rationalization, 1924-29, comprises the Germany that  —  despite World War I and the ensuing hardships and economic chaos¹³ —  was generally seen to represent the peak of our civilization. It was the Germany of Bauhaus, of Thomas Mann, of Einstein, of von Stroheim and their counterparts in the arts, sciences, and engineering¹⁴  —  in virtually everything connoting intellect, taste, and progress in that era. That same Germany reeked of decadence, so incisively portrayed in the works of Bertold Brecht, George Grosz, Kurt Weill, and others. In the 1920s, it was also the Germany in which traditional small businesses were being pulverized, first by inflation, then by the simultaneous impact of giant businesses and strong unions  —  while their owners were being appalled by the sapping of what had been gemütlichkeit Germany. It came to be the Germany that had the largest Left and the best organized and most extreme Right in the world.

Each time Rationalization is read, it yields new insights, new worries, new hopes and, perhaps most importantly, a deeper understanding of just how dangerously modern society swerves between enhancing or destroying “life and culture.” Brady's very next book, The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism, was his chilling and tragic delineation of the “new order” that took Germany to its incredibly swift plunge from what had been the peak of Western civilization to what became the pit of human history, previously unimaginable in its frightfulness. The roots of the rationalization movement are found in Germany's connected economic and military aspirations and needs just before and just after this century began. Veblen provided a basis for understanding all that and, as well, the character of German socioeconomic power that facilitated the transformation of German society to one that could respond to both aim and need.

Brady, as always acknowledging his debt to Veblen, carried the analysis further, not just as regards “the advantages of borrowing…” and the enduring hold of Germany's feudal past on its evolving capitalism, but also the grim logic for coordinating and militarizing a deliberately industrializing society that lacked many vital natural resources. All this had to be sought in a volatile world, where assured access to resources (as well as their locations, markets, investment outlets, and strategic ports) was blocked, controlled by the “have” nations. Britain, the hegemon of the nineteenth century, was able to make up for whatever it lacked in resources through the extent of its empire and its trade. What Britain did not control, others did, leaving the “have-nots”  —  Germany, Italy, and Japan-to drive toward desperation, fascism, and war.¹⁵

Brady explored the nineteenth century development of Germany in a compact and clarifying essay [Brady 1943b] that serves as a useful preface to Rationalization. In a telling image, Brady argued that, seeking strength within the tormenting combination of large aims and limited resources, “Germany grew the economic limbs of a giant only to be confined in space fit for a pigmy” [1943b, 109]. To achieve its desired economic and military strength, the main object of German capital accumulation was heavy industry (mining, metallurgy, chemicals, the engineering and electrical industries, and shipbuilding)-ideal for speeding up industrialization and for building a war machine. World War I, which seems retrospectively to have been virtually unavoidable, was both a partial consequence of Germany's development and an important stimulus for what after 1924 came to be the rationalization movement.

In the sociohistorical context of Germany, rationalization soon became an important element contributing to the social devastation that took hold after 1929, as Brady shows; but when he first began his research, it was because he saw rationalization as having a potential for enhancing social well-being. Planning was written with the post-World War lI United States in mind, for which, in the late 1940s, it was possible to have better hopes.¹⁶ Be that as it may, for Germany, the fundamentals of rationalization were that …throughout the entire range of rationalization activities there are to be found the directing concepts of plan, order, system, foresight, control, and rational guidance. In detail and at large rationalization is planning, and planning calls for the full mobilization of all scientific information and the rational utilization of unscientific criteria as to means [1950a, viii; emphasis in original]. But, Brady immediately asks, means to what and to whose ends? How [to] reconcile the divergent interests of capital and labor, industry and agriculture, producers and consumers…, in particular in a society whose very basis of organization holds within it fundamental conflicts of interest? [1950a, viii] The underlying difficulties of containing these conflicts were very much camouflaged by the fact that the ideas and implementation of rationalization were born during and because of war (and as a relatively inchoate set of ideas, by comparison with their refinement in the late 1920s), when social conflicts are always obscured by the cloudy national interest of victory or survival. When the considerably more comprehensive program of the 1920s unfolded and its inherent difficulties were revealed, they were also magnified because of the enduring and combined impact of horrendous inflation, the incapacitating economic impact of Versailles,¹⁷ and associated political turmoil. Thus, in 1924, …rationalization was begun, and largely carried through, at a time when forces were converging to undermine the institutional framework of German capitalism [1950a, xiv]. And then came 1929. Despite the ensuing catastrophe, Brady concluded in his Introduction, …the development of rationalization in Germany has shown more or less clearly the possibilities and the directional drives inherent in the movement, and [among those who have studied it] there is sufficient appreciation of the shortcomings of rationalization as carried out, to justify the rather significant sub-title of this study, “A Study in the Evolution of Economic Planning” [1950a, xxi; emphasis in original]. Mention has been made of Germany's large aims and limited resources. That it was nonetheless able to move forward rapidly and effectively into heavy industrialization was partially but importantly an outcome of its earlier checkerboard existence as hundreds of principalities and their associated bureaucracies. The serendipitous product was the most literate society in the world and the highest proportion of skilled craftspeople: a deep mine of talent that provided Germany with much of the “social capital” it needed to deal effectively with problems of organization, science, and technology. For Germany, more than others in its era, “necessity was the mother of invention.”¹⁸

The successful fusing of science and technology was the source of Germany's ability to develop substitutes (“ersatz”) for resource deficiencies. The most important of these substitutes was coal tar derivatives, which not only made up for petroleum deficiencies, but also became the basis for Germany's vanguard explosives industry. Given such accomplishments, it was recognized that maximum productive efficiency was essential, and this in turn demanded the essence of rationalization: “…plan, order, system, foresight, control, and rational guidance.”

As Brady shows in great detail in his studies of particular industries (Part 2 of Rationalization), it was first in Germany that “foresight” and “plan” treated as one industry what elsewhere operated separately, as regards location and production schedules-in mining, metallurgy, and the engineering industries, for example-with the result of optimum productive efficiency. Ownership of the enterprises involved was normally individual, but control was overarching: through widespread cartels and the links between finance and industry and the state, control and coordination assured some close approximation of a planned economic process.¹⁹

By 1900, the powerful German economy was already straining to find markets in a relatively buoyant and expanding world economy. The rationalization movement after 1924 increased both productive capacities and efficiency, especially in the heavy industries. With a lagging world economy, only alarming troubles could lie ahead. The collapse of 1929 therefore made even more dire the possibilities for Germany.

As the rationalization movement evolved in Germany and created a more efficient economy, it also added density to the always great concentration and centralization of power in Germany, which came to be dedicated to the defeat of the considerable Left of Germany. Thus, as the 1930s opened, the doors slammed shut on Germany's fate.

The elements of rationalization made it necessary to coalesce the socioeconomic process around what had virtually always and everywhere been disparate: science, organization, technology, management, standardization, and what we think of as micro-macro-trade processes  —  while, however, raising a host of related economic, social, and political problems.

Brady spends almost half of Rationalization on the economic problems: those within industries (e.g., extensive duplication of facilities), and between industries (e.g., developing means for coordination and integration for both demand and supply), and those concerned with the economy as a whole  —  managing flows of resources as well as monetary, fiscal, and trade “flows.”

Dealing with all that would have been difficult enough to accomplish in a calm setting; but Germany's and the world's waters in the late 1920s were already roiling. Revolutionary and counterrevolutionary strife flooded Germany after the war, and the 1920s saw the steady erosion of the once-crowded political center.²⁰ The conflicts were numerous. Perhaps the most important were what Brady calls “the attitude of labor” and, linked to but separate from that, the role of the state: taken together, they were the sum of what Germans had called “the social question” from the time of Bismarck.

As the 1920s unfolded, labor and the German Left, like Germany itself, fell into two increasingly combative parts: the most numerous group of Germany's large labor movement gave its support to social democracy; the rest, also numerous, supported communism. The conflict between them finally served the interests of those who opposed both groups, of Nazism, and became a tragedy for all of Germany and for much of the world. But that will be part of our focus when we examine German Fascism. First we turn to what has undoubtedly been Brady's most widely-read and influential book, Business as a System of Power (hereafter: Business).

Capitalism Under Pressure

Business analyzed the main economic, political, and social tendencies of the six major industrial capitalist nations in the interwar period, tendencies that in the absence of substantial and positive social change Brady saw as taking Britain and the United States in the same directions as the others: France, Germany, Italy, and Japan; and German Fascism had earlier shown what the latter direction entailed.²¹ More abstractly, in his Foreword, the sociologist Robert S. Lynd found the essence of the book to be “about power and the organization of power around the logic of technology as operated under capitalism” [Brady 1943a, viii].

Business, Brady says, is a comparative study of the attempts of the six nations “to expand business controls within the several capitalist systems….At the outset of such an effort.” Part 1 argues, “one is struck by four extremely interesting facts”: First, the transformations undergone by business organization in [the totalitarian] countries are fully consonant with, and may be considered the logical outgrowths of, previous trends in structure, policies, and controls within the business world itself.

Second, along every significant line the parallelisms in the evolution of business centralization within the several national systems, including those within countries still functioning on a liberal-capitalistic basis, are so close as to make them appear the common product of a single plan.

Third, all business policies have been increasingly discussed and formulated in the face of widespread…popular opposition…, which more and more challenges the traditional business view of the proper objectives and the responsibilities of economic leadership….

And finally, the implications of power in such wide-spreading business controls, together with the popular challenge to business leaders, cause all economic issues to take on a political meaning, and thereby cause the role of the government to grow in importance in a sort of geometric ratio [1943a, 5-7]. Those words were written in 1942, by which year the United States had joined Britain and the Soviet Union in the war against the fascist powers. But it bears reminding that the United States did not enter that war until attacked by the Japanese; and that Germany's and Italy's declaration of war against us preceded ours against them. Most remember Britain and Munich, 1938; few remember that the United States, along with Britain and France, looked the other way (or worse) when Germany and Italy combined with Franco's Falange to overthrow the democratically elected Spanish government in the Civil War of 1936-39; and it was only a much-maligned longshore union in San Francisco that sought to cut off oil exports to Japan. As he wrote, Brady's memories were still fresh of how deeply implicated business and political leaders of the liberal-capitalist states had been in matters that supported and strengthened fascism  —  and weakened its social democratic and communist opposition. As the U.S. war against fascism went into high gear, Brady was not likely to forget that he had been stigmatized some years earlier for being “premature.”

Part 2 is a detailed description of the overall behavior of business power in Britain and the United States, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan. For those whose consciousness has been formed in the expanding and buoyant years since World War II, Brady's characterizations of business attitudes, behavior, and politics will appear fanciful, despite his fastidious documentation. Capitalism was very much under stress throughout the world in the interwar period (except for the illusory “twenties” in the United States); and as the stresses have once more mounted since the “seventies,” something more than pale glimmerings remind of that earlier period, with more of the same on its way. The stresses of Brady's period were not confined to business, of course-ordinary people had as much or more reason to be concerned. Political consciousness, by comparison with today, was strong and widespread-and much feared in the business world.

For reasons soon to be noted, the particular kinds of attitudes, behavior, and policies of organized business analyzed by Brady are unlikely to repeat themselves in our day. Brady's main organizational emphasis was on what he called “peak associations”  —  especially associations of trade associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). In the 1940s, the NAM seemed all-powerful, able in 194?, for example, not only to induce Congress to pass the union-weakening Taft-Hartley Act, but also to override President Truman's veto.²²

Trade associations (and the NAM) still exist and are not without power; but of course the center of business power now is found in a few hundred supercorporations and their (or their industries') lobbyists. Their specific political aims have changed a lot in the much-changed post-World War II world. But have their attitudes changed toward what constitutes a proper environment for business? And if so, have the changes been for the better? That there is uncertainty on such questions makes it worth looking once more at Brady's studies.

The three chapters of Part 3 of Business are concerned with (1) “Economic Policies: Monopoly, Protection, Privilege,” (2) “Social Policies: Status, Trusteeship, Harmony,” and (3) “Political Policies: Bureacracy, Hierarchy, Totalitarianism.”

Economists, especially those acquainted with Veblen (or even Adam Smith), will find few surprises when they read that the universal aim of business is to control the market, whether the applicable institution be called monopoly, oligopoly, cartel, collusion, or whatever. That such an aim is not a whim of a particular capitalist or nation is made starkly clear as Brady brings together the economic policy goals of the business groups of the six nations under review, so very similar despite their differences in so many other respects.

Today's is a different world, one of conglomerate and transnational corporations, all of them in a relationship with their respective states that has grown increasingly close as their power and state power have grown  —  and as popular political power (whether that of unions or their political parties) has waned, its place taken by consumerism and disarray. That there is a predictable process stretching from here to the future must be doubted; but that business will continue to function within a system of power mainly of its own making cannot be.

When we turn to Brady's Chapter 8, “Social Policies,” we are confronted with both the most problematic and the most ominous of business attitudes and practices, even making allowances for much-changed circumstances: As monopoly stands at the center of the new economics, so status is at the heart of its appropriate social outlook…, the complementary products of that modernized system of “granted privilege,” “special concession,” “neo-mercantilism,” “generalized protection,” and “feudalistic capitalism” being brought about by the growing centralization of policy-forming power…[in] all major capitalistic economies [1943a, 259]. For the interwar years, those words were more descriptive than speculative for most of Western Europe, if considerably less so for the United States. As the future unrolls, they may apply more to the United States than to Western Europe. It is in the United States, more than in the other rich industrial societies, that Disraeli's “two nations” seem already to be well advanced: Two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thought, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.²³ The status societies of the sort created in Europe through the (initially) capitalist-supported fascist regimes and their militarized and frenetic propaganda are unlikely to be reproduced, if only because they have become (in business terms) unnecessary. But it is not necessary to envision the return of medieval or fascist forms of social control to be alarmed about the great socioeconomic power of business.

The thrust for state power has been effectively camouflaged, especially in Britain and the United States, by the unremitting campaign of business against “government.” Brady opens his chapter on this matter with a quoted observation whose applicability seems to be both universal and enduring: The animosity of German capitalism against the state does not rest upon fundamental theoretical foundations, but upon purely opportunistic considerations. It is opposed to the state when state control is in the hands of a political majority whose permanent goodwill it doubts.²⁴ Business in the United States revealed its main preferences in this regard as the “prosperity decade” became the “depression decade.” Under the guidance principally of Gerard Swope (head of General Electric), what began as a campaign for “self-government in business” became, as business turned sour, a program of full cartelization backed by the power of the state: the National Recovery Administration (NRA) of 1933. Through the NRA, more than 800 industries were allowed to “govern themselves.” In practice that meant the trade associations, dominated by their largest members and operating through the “code authorities,” were allowed to set minimum prices, output, and geographic quotas, and much else: the peak association dream come true; even better, militarized  —  as it was by its chief administrator, General Hugh S. Johnson.²⁵

The depression hit the United States and Germany with equal statistical severity: a 50 percent drop in industrial production between 1929 and 1933. But what became very hard times for the people of the United States was a catastrophe for Germany, whose structural imbalance in favor of heavy industry, critical dependence upon exports and imported raw materials, and always inflamed social tensions left no room to maneuver. The onset of depression ruptured the thin membrane that had restrained Germany's long-threatening extremism.

Capitalism Run Amok

Like Brady's other books examined here, German Fascism [1937] is lengthy and tightly packed; unlike the others, it is more concerned with “noneconomic” than economic matters. More than half of the book analyzes and describes what Marx would have seen as the “superstructure”  —  ideology, politics, religion  —  and Veblen's realm of “the parental bent” and its “idle curiosity”science, the arts, the human spirit, and how all this was brutalized and militarized.²⁶

His emphases were appropriate. Whatever the substantial support Hitler may have had from organized business in his drive for power, economic matters were not his central concern: in order to gain the power they sought, and even more in order to use it as they chose, the Nazis had to wreak monstrous transformations in attitudes and behavior at all levels and in all quarters of German society.

Like so many others who had lived and worked in the “beauteous Germany” noted earlier, and then witnessed its descent into hell, Brady found the process “heartbreaking” [1937, xii]. The book opens with his almost lyrical description of the Germany of 1924-29: its freedom, its well-being, its intellectual and artistic achievements: “even in a country with such a glorious scientific past, [Germany possessed] a renascence in achievements of the mind” [1937, 5]. But, [that] which most forcibly struck the observer of the German scene was, rather, that underneath all this one sensed a certain lurking fear, a certain undefinable and not-to-be forgotten dread…, a mood compounded of a desire to forget and a haste to enjoy before some new and nameless horror should sweep away what little there was left [1937, 7]. And with good reason. Even in the rosy years after 1924, unemployment remained serious, and even those relatively few good years did not mean increased levels of living for the mass of the people so much as a “short wave of increased business activity and of short-run stock-market gains” [1937, 13].

The Weimar Republic (1918–1933), modeled on some combination of U.S. and British institutions, was ill-designed to cope with either the harshness of German class conflict or its simmering ideological and cultural strife. What had been seen as a flowering of democracy was more like a briarpatch: In the [political] center were to be found practically all the “white collar” salaried and professional classes, small shopkeepers, tradesmen, and handicraftsmen, the bulk of the peasantry, the government bureaucracies, the bulk of the rank and file of the more conservative trade unions, the Catholic Church and the Protestant Confessions, and the more timorous adherents of the two extreme wings. Without any forces, organization, or principles to unite it, made up of the hesitant, the confused, and the compromising elements of society, this amorphous mass was being slowly dissolved between the opposing cross-fire [1937, 18]. For several years preceding 1932, the electoral battle raged; in that year, the Nazi vote and the combined Communist and Social Democratic vote ran neck-and-neck. When, in 1933, the Nazi vote declined and the combined Left vote rose, it seemed that time was on the side of the latter.

But two developments determined a contrary outcome:

(1) as the economic crisis continued to deepen, a series of conferences were held between Hitler and various industrial and financial leaders in the Rhineland. With their support came that of the Junkers…and the bulk of the manufacturing and shipping interests of the country. Thereafter organized business lent its support to Hitler either openly or surreptitiously; and

(2) in 1932, the Social Democratic Party chose to play a lone hand and to cooperate with the various centrist or so-called republican parties [1937, 20]. To which, it must be added, as the party in control of the formal machinery of the state, the Social Democrats were timid in confrontation with the always-increasing fanaticism and brutality of the Nazis, and they “did not even force the Nazis to comply with ordinary criminal law” [1937, 21].

President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933; in March the Weimar Constitution was suspended (permanently, as it developed). What had been bierstube and rough-and-tumble politics and street terrorism became codified and institutionalized as the Third Reich. Those who had supported the Nazis or leaned in that direction became part of a fully totalitarian and authoritarian, fully militarized society; the rest either remained silent and/or were sent off to the camps to be enslaved or murdered.

The key determinant of this descent into horror, Brady shows, was the combination of an economy neither structured nor inclined to bring well-being for most or stability for itself, combined with an explosive social setting. Rather than the roots of Nazism being found in a deep and pervasive anti-Semitism, it was the genius of the Nazis to convert a relatively moderate anti-Semitism (by comparison with France, Poland, or Russia, say) into hysteria and the Holocaust, as they were able to convert the malign and foolish  —  and effectively unenforced  —  Versailles Treaty into a tool for building social insanity. By now it is clear that the Nazis had no monopoly on such “genius.” What happened there and then was less a triumph for Nazism than it was one of the many defeats that our civilization shows itself capable of provoking. But our civilization, it may be hoped, has other and finer possibilities. Brady concerned himself with those in his unpublished Planning and Technology, to which I now turn.²⁷

Planning or Else

Reflecting on the ghastly developments of the years preceding the end of World War II, Brady “grasped the nettle firmly” and sought to show that modern industrialism need not be monstrous, that it could open the door to a truly bountiful society  —  IF rationally organized, and IF steadily more democratic in all its dimensions. Neither in Planning nor in any of his writings did he ever call for “revolution.” But he did argue that for modern capitalism to survive, it had to become either more undemocratic, moving toward fascism, or always more democratic, moving toward social and industrial democracy. Brady was hardly naive about such matters; as we have seen in Business, he saw the natural tendencies of capitalist societies as heading toward authoritarianism and repression.

But Planning was written in the years immediately after the war, years that Brady found to be promising as well as ominous; it is a work based on hope, on a certain faith in our good sense and decency as a people.

Planning was seen by Brady as “prefatory to two other studies which place the human and cultural implications of planning in the forefront of discussion,” whilst this one  —  itself still in the draft stages  —  was “on the environing and conditioning factors of technological evolution.”²⁸ “This study,” the first and only (partially realized) volume, “is devoted to an examination of the bearing of technology upon problems of social and economic planning” [1950a, 12].

As earlier, I list chapters and provide a few excerpts, for lack of space. Like Rationalization, and despite its status as a “draft,” Planning is well worth reading by those who would understand modern U.S. industrialism. Part 1, “The Planning of Production in an Industrial System,” has seven substantial chapters covering various industries, agriculture, and distribution. Part 2 consists of five chapters titled “Concerning the Technical Coefficients of Production for a Theory of Planning,” “Freedom of Consumer Choice and Resource Mobilization,” “Use and Conservation of Resources,” “Mobilization and Permeation of Scientific Resources,” and “Tracing Costs and Computing Potentials.” Brady's general conclusion in Planning was that: technological and economic factors at the current levels of scientific and engineering knowledge favor, as a condition to realization of their productive potentials, a most comprehensive and ever-widening program of long-range planning [1950a, 14]. As this century draws to its close, there can scarcely be anyone who might read those words without raising a multitude of questions-as did Brady, when he wrote them: At what price is all this to be achieved? What of the human beings who must live in this world? Would it not be regimented? robotized? Would not everything be done by formula? verified by the slide-rule? timed? clocked? docketed? as in a monstrous and soul-devouring “Brave New World”? What would happen to the poems, the fancies, the drama of the artistic genius? the whims and irrationalities of the common man? Of life, death, love, marriage, families, religion, philosophy, Weltanschauung? Of freedom of conscience, thought, belief, hopes, fears, despairs? [1950a, 14] He goes on to answer those questions with what he sees as the prime challenge of living within the many imperatives of an industrial world: If planning  —  as in their turn the machine and science itself  —  is not adapted or adaptable to the life and values of man, then we are better off without it. The acid test is the capacity of planning to free not to enslave, to enlarge not to cramp and destroy, to adjust to man and his culture and not require servile obeisances to its insensate Molochs [1950a, 15]. And, he proceeds to argue: Planning is as consistent with decentralization as with centralization…, it can provide solutions for all-including the very worst-cases of bureaucratic arteriosclerosis, and…it can be so conceived as to make of it the great releaser, rather than the destroyer of individual initiative and the creative unfolding of the good life for the whole of the people of this world polis [1950a, 16]. I close this section, and this review of Brady's works, with a long quotation that as much as any other represents the essence of Brady's thought: The productive potential  —  at least two or three times as high for the U.S., for example, as was achieved during the highest point in the 2nd world war (when it was close to double in 1944 that of any preceding peace-time year)  —  can only be achieved by a high degree of rational social planning. “Plenty for all” by any standards of comfort and leisure which this generation, at least, is apt to formulate is now a definite possibility in the U.S. There are parallel possibilities for most other areas of the habitable globe. And in democracy lies the only possibility for employing this plenty in such a way as to canalize the basic drives which otherwise lead to wars, social conflicts, and other predatory expressions of these drives, so as to cater to the common human welfare of all. Finally, without democratic participation in both policy and execution, the mere potential in times of peace cannot be achieved. On the contrary, the higher the level of the technological potential, the more is absence of democratic participation apt to mean a corresponding withdrawal of efficiency. It is not only desirable that the two appear together; it is also impossible for long to lose one without destroying the other [1950a, 18].

The Relevance of Brady Today

This memoir began by connecting Brady with Veblen in their shared conviction that capitalist society, always changing in more ways and more rapidly, exists in a precarious balance  —  poised between what could become either social catastrophe or significant social improvement  —  and both taught that the path toward disaster was the more likely.

It is commonplace that those who see themselves as following in the footsteps of Veblen comprise a motley group, their “positions” falling on diverse parts of the political spectrum. The Veblen essays put together by Mitchell [1945]²⁹ show Veblen to be considerably broader than Brady; but a reading of Brady shows him to be considerably less diffuse than Veblen. And, to put it simply, those who might be considered to be “Bradyites” would all be found on the left of the political spectrum: not true of “Veblenites,” as a reading of Mitchell, Dorfman  —  or the JEI over the years  —  would show. Brady was always unequivocal, whether concerned with methodology, fascism, capitalist tendencies, or the imperatives of an industrial society.

Probably the most comfortable conclusion for readers of this essay would be Brady's insistence on the need for social analysis to become something of “a seamless web” if it is to accord with the manner in which the social process moves and is shaped. And the most discomfiting would be Brady's persuasive arguments concerning the need to bring about a thoroughly democratic and comprehensively planned industrial society unless we wish to acquiesce in the implacable (if also irregular) movement toward a society controlled in its every nook and cranny by business means and ends. In a phrase, we can and must be objective, but in this world it is folly to be neutral.³⁰

To gain the privilege of becoming teachers and scholars is to take on an obligation to serve the society that has made it possible, and that does not mean (as Veblen put it) to “reach conclusions innocuous to the existing law and order, particularly with respect to religion, ownership, and the distribution of wealth” [1918, 135]. Nor does this point to some particular politics; it does imply that the studied aloofness common to our craft is something worse than hypocrisy.

There are no workable blueprints that tell us how to move from a dangerous to a safe society, nor did Brady try to construct one. But he did show us in great detail within a compelling analysis just how this present unsafe society works and what a safer, saner, and more prosperous society would look like.

Brady's last writing was done in the 1950s. So much has changed since then as to make today's seem another world entirely. If anything, however, there is less reason for complacency today than 40 years ago, however little there may have been then. Of those innumerable large and small changes, one stands out that would have heightened Veblen's scorn and Brady's rage, concerned so much as both were with waste and inefficiency: both actual and potential production have risen to undreamed of heights-at the same time that more than three-quarters of a billion people are subject to famine and two billion suffer from malnutrition (from which 40,000 children die every day),³¹ as the world spends a good trillion dollars yearly on the military, as producers and nations struggle to find ways to deal with excess capacities in almost everything, and 10 to 15 percent of the world's wealthiest people flit from shop to shop.

All this has a moral connotation that neither Veblen nor Brady would have made much of; but both would have pointed to how dangerous it is for a world to produce such clashing areas of desperation, the one because of too much, the other because of too little. Our job is to bridge that gap analytically so that it and others can be closed before we are done in by them. The relevance of Brady today is that he makes that task easier for those who would perform it.

References

Brady, Robert A.“Industrial Standardization.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1929.

__________ The Rationalization Movement in German Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1933.

__________ The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism. New York: Viking, 1937.

__________ Business as a System of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943a.

__________ “The Economic Impact of Imperial Germany: Industrial Policy.” In The Tasks of Economic History (Supplement No. 3 to The Journal of Economic History) (December 1943b).

__________ Planning and Technology. Mimeo, University of California at Berkeley Library, 1950a.

__________ Crisis in Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950b.

__________ The Citizen's Stake in Price Control. Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield Adams, 1952.

__________ Organization, Automation, and Society: The ScientificRevolution in Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961.

Brady, Joan. Theory of War. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Clark, John Maurice. Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923.

Dorfman, Joseph. Thorstein Veblen and His America. New York: Viking, 1934.

Dowd, Douglas F. “On Veblen, Mills, and the Decline of Criticism.” Dissent (Winter 1964).

__________ U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776: Of, By, and For Which People? Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1993.

Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Rinehart, 1941.

Gerschenkron, Alexander. Bread and Democracy in Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943.

Gross, Bertram. Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America. New York: M. Evans, 1980.

Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and Unequal. New York: Ballantine, 1992.

Keynes, John Maynard. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. New York: Macmillan, 1919.

Lerner, Max. The Portable Veblen. New York: Viking, 1948.

Lustig, R. Jeffrey. Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Mitchell, Broadus. Depression Decade: From New Era Through New Deal, 1929-1941. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1989.

Mitchell, Wesley Clair. What Veblen Taught. New York: Viking, 1945.

Prothro, James W. Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Macmillan, 1899.

__________ The Theory of Business Enterprise. New York: Scribner's, 1904.

__________ The Vested Interests and the Common Man. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1910.

__________ The Instinct of Workmanship. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1914.

__________ Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. New York: Macmillan, 1915.

__________ The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1918.

__________ Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1923.

Notes

1. See especially Veblen [1914].Return to text
2. Hereafter: German Fascism. This book, the first in English concerning Nazism, remains the most compelling and insightful of such studies. Among Brady's writings on Germany, it was preceded in 1933 by The Rationalization Movement in German Industry (hereafter: Rationalization)  —  again, the first and still most comprehensive study in English. Both these books will be discussed at length in later pages. Here it may be noted that in 1938, a year or so after the publication of German Fascism, Brady was summoned to a bruising session of the House Un-American Activities Committee which, continuing in the spirit and enlarging on the methods of the “Red Scare” of the 1920s, provided continuity for the House and Senate committees of the 1950s et seq., which did so much for Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy, among others. Brady, like many others who sought to hold back the spread of fascism in those years, was officially classified as being “prematurely anti-fascist”  —  a laughable designation, but one must weep for the nation that could invent it. Return to text
3. All this is, of course, related in detail in Dorfman [ 1934]. Return to text
4. The purchase and sale of children —  white children  —  was common in the years after the Civil War, black slavery having been outlawed. The children could be said to have been in the category of “indentured servants,” except that the latter were normally obligated for a period of four to seven years (rather than until age 21, as was common for “boughten” children), and were usually obligated by themselves, rather than sold by another in the manner of slaves. There is no accounting of how many of such white slaves there were, how many of them survived until age 21, nor of the horrors they endured whether or not they survived. All this and much more is at the center of a brilliantly written, gripping, and horrifying novel by Joan Brady [1993], daughter of Robert Brady. In her “Author's note,” she says simply that “my grandfather was a slave….[This] so scarred him that no one who came near him afterwards could escape the effects of it; four of his seven children-including my father-ended up as suicides.” I must add that although I knew Brady well, he never referred to his childhood, except to indicate that his father was severe and puritanical; it was not until I read Joan Brady's book that I could begin to understand, finally, the combination of rage and yearning that characterized Brady's scholarship. Return to text
5. I am grateful to Paul Sweezy for having reminded me of this important point about accumulation theory. The core analyses of Marx and Veblen and Brady can be synthesized, of course, and have been, and not only as regards their “political economy.” Among others, I have worked along those lines, as, for example, in Chapters 1 and 2 of Dowd [1993].  Return to text
6. I am indebted to Professor Jeffrey Lustig (of California State University, Sacramento) for reminding me of these (among other) important points and, as well, for having initially prompted me to undertake this memoir. I have explored the similarities and differences between Mills and Veblen in Dowd [1964]. An enjoyable and illuminating essay on Veblen as “outsider” is found in the Introduction of Lerner [1948]. Return to text
7. John Maurice Clark was, of course, the son of John Bates Clark, one of Veblen's teachers at Carleton College as Veblen, in a nice historical twist, became one of J. M.'s teachers. J. M. was clearly more influenced by Veblen than by his father-as shown in J. M.'s most important book [Clark 1923]. In that book, Clark developed an analysis integrating technological processes with structural relations and macro with micro behavior to form a basis for public policy. There has been no serious pursuit of his analysis in subsequent decades, apart from some excessively abstract essays. Despite the fact that the general thrust of Overhead Costs is still pertinent, to say the least, the work is virtually unknown in the profession today  —  a revealing instance of the decadence of our profession. Return to text
8. In 1951, Brady attempted suicide  —  induced by some combination of personal and political stress  —  and failed. He was able to continue his work at the university and to complete his last book in the mid-1950s (but it was not published until 1961). He suffered a stroke at that time (undoubtedly connected with the earlier suicide attempt) and was incapacitated, unable to speak clearly, or to use one side of his body, until his death in 1963. Of the political stress, more will be said in later pages.  Return to text
9. Nor has one forgotten, in that same class  —  offered only at 8 A.M.  —  that promptly as the campanile struck the hour Brady locked the door against would-be late entrants. Return to text
10. I will not discuss two of the books noted in the References that are concerned with Britain [1950b] or with price control [1952]. The former is a critique of the Labour government's policies, which Brady saw as timid to the point of self-defeat; the latter is a forceful analysis of the need for, but also the limitations and biases of, the price control mechanisms of the Korean War period. To discuss either of these adequately would go beyond the intent of this already long essay. Return to text
11. That there have been and are honorable exceptions is of course true: Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, J. M. Clark, Clarence Ayres, but they are rarely read  —  and if read, not heeded  —  by those who have provided us with our “guiding theory.”  Return to text
12. Veblen [1910, 85–86]. In the ensuing 75 years, of course, the “shifty behavior” of the facts has accelerated so greatly as to become kaleidoscopic, while the “preconceptions” of our discipline snooze within a cocoon made of analytical nostalgia for a past that, for better or for worse, never existed. Return to text
13. One example should suffice to underscore that point: the price level in Germany between 1918–1923 rose four trillion times.  Return to text
14. It was the Germany of Walter Rathenau, the guiding intellect of the rationalization movement, going back to the years before and during World War I. He was murdered by Nazi thugs. Some may wonder how rationalization compares with the “Taylorism” of the United States. The latter was a species of the same genus, but as housecats and tigers are [see p. 325]. Return to text
15. France, among all the European nations most blessed with agricultural and some mineral resources, and possessed of an empire second only to Britain's, did not face the same “have not” urgencies for moving toward militarized capitalism as did Germany, Italy, and Japan. But French politics had long been among the most warlike and its class divisions among the most bitter in Europe. The socioeconomic crisis of the interwar years assured that France would move substantially to the Left or to the Right (or, as it happened, to both, in that order). The United States, like Britain, had an enormous empire-in our case, containing an unparalleled resource cornucopia within what became the 48 states. Return to text
16. And different, as well as some similar, fears. I remember well more than one conversation with Brady as the poisons of the Cold War were seeping into our lives in the late 1940s, taking the form by 1950–51 at Berkeley of a Regents' (trustees')-imposed faculty “loyalty oath.” Brady led the fight against that monstrous absurdity, arguing that if it were not stopped there it would spread over the nation. It was not, and it did. Soon after, between the time I was offered and then took a position at Cornell, an oath had been imposed for New York State. The turmoil, the frustrations, and the defeats involved in the loyalty oath fight were doubtless among the factors responsible for Brady's suicide attempt. Return to text
17. Concerning which Keynes [1919] was illuminating as regards the savagery of the intent and the disaster of the consequences. Return to text
18. As has also been so for the Japanese, and was much earlier for the Dutch, whose principal enemy and resource was water. Some will remember that Veblen's more insightful comment [Veblen 1914] was that “invention is the mother of necessity.”  Return to text
19. When the Soviets began their five-year plans in the late 1920s, they adopted these practices-what the Germans called “agglutination”-for their “combinats.”  Return to text
20. See Gerschenkron [1943], an impressive study of the dynamic connections between economic and political change, illuminated by a running chart of electoral changes in the 1920s and early 1930s. A very different kind of book, but equally illuminating, is the sociopsychological classic of Fromm [1941].  Return to text
21. Those who are puzzled to find France in company with what became the Axis powers will find Chapter 4 edifying. There Brady shows that before war broke out in 1939 France “had halted but a single pace short of the establishment of a 'corporative' [fascist] system” and that “under the most recent Petain [Vichy] regime the last step has already been taken…, and France stands in the ante-room of a formally Fascist-type state” [1943a, 120].  Return to text
22. A perhaps wry instance of how the NAM's meaning had faded already by the 1970s is that a substantially left political movement of mostly young people called itself “NAM”  —  the New American Movement  —  without irony.  Return to text
23. The quote is borrowed from Hacker [1992, vii]. Hacker's focus is on racism and poverty in the United States and what connects with them. But the entire world is becoming divided into two planets, partially as a function of world politics, but also, and in the long run more importantly, as a function of business power. As such, the weaker nations, like the weaker people within the United States, become victims of combined and coalesced economic, military, political, and social power. As for the United States, our population is minimally class conscious, and thus the principal historical prod to fascism is absent; but the hates, fears, and social paralysis connecting with racism and its ramifications could easily serve to ignite a conflagration that would lead to increased social militarization. Gross [1980], writing in the year Reagan was first elected, provides a calm and systematic warning of things to come  —  all too many of which already have  —  in the absence of a determined popular effort to find a different course. To date that effort has been conspicuous by its failure to take hold.  Return to text
24. 24. Brady is quoting from M.J. Bonn, Das Schicksal des deutschen Kapitalismus (1931), written, as Brady observes, “on the eve of the Nazi coup d'etat” [1943a, 294].  Return to text
25. The general was known as “a master of discipline,” as one who would “crack down” on recalcitrants, etc.; and he developed an effective propaganda campaign around the “Blue Eagle,” the emblem of which was to induce patriotic consumers to buy only where it was displayed. It is not surprising that in 1934 a delegation of the new Nazi economic council came to study how the NRA functioned. See Mitchell [1989, chap. 7] for the full story of the NRA including its demise as unconstitutional in 1935. Two books that provide an invaluable complement to Brady's discussions of the United States are Prothro [1954] and, more broadly, Lustig [1982], the latter being very much influenced by Brady.  Return to text
26. The first chapter is a general discussion of the 1920s prelude to Nazism. Then, in order, “Science, Handmaiden of Inspired Truth,” “The Arts and Education as Tools of Propaganda,” “Labor Must Follow Where Capital Leads,” “Women, the Cradle, and the Plow,” and so on. (The chapter headings are taken from Nazi documents.)  Return to text
27. Quite apart from the substantive importance of this work, it is interesting because it is mimeographed, single-spaced, both sides of the page, and several hundred pages long: a vanished species. It was put together by then graduate student John A. Brittain (subsequently a senior statistician with the Brookings Institution) in the period when Brady was recovering from his suicide attempt. To my knowledge Brady never returned to this work but turned his efforts to Organization. Planning overlaps in many ways with and clearly provided a basis for Organization, but its focus, narrower than the latter, is restricted to the data, the problems, and the possibilities of the United States.  Return to text
28. See page 15. The quotations that follow from Planning are drawn entirely from its Chapter 1, a summary chapter written especially for this draft version.  Return to text
29. Brady was a student of Mitchell's. Business is dedicated to Mitchell, but in what has been seen as a sardonic phrase: "Who, without knowing it, has had much to do with the writing of this book." Return to text
30. And almost always a sham. To seek change is obviously to be political; but it is just as political to support the status quo, openly or by default.  Return to text
31. The data are put out regularly by UNICEF. The 40,000 figure was for 1986, doubtless an understatement by now.  Return to text

June 23, 2003