A recent article in The New Republic was entitled "Hoover's Tragedy." Some of us thought at the time that the tragedy was rather that of the people who had believed Mr.
Herbert Hoover’s defense of his administration at Des Moines is like the climax of a Greek tragedy. It represents, as in Aristotle’s definition, the struggle against inexorable fate of a good but not wholly guiltless man. Elected four years ago on the flood tide of success and fame, he now faces certain and probably overwhelming rejection because of the misfortunes which have overtaken both him and his people. Though he still thinks of these misfortunes as being undeserved, their origins are inextricably interwoven with his own past.
Foreigners are fond of calling us the land of paradoxes. Our public finances certainly justify that characterization. The richest country in the world has been the most dilatory in balancing its budget and appears the most distracted and embarrassed in attaining that end. The fundamental explanation, of course, is the systematically inculcated hostility to the taxation of wealth. For ten years the press has sedulously repeated the Mellon 'doctrine that the immunity of the rich from taxation is a blessing for the poor.
American industry possesses the finest physical plant in the world, but our ability to get goods from it depends, of course, upon the skill with which we manage it. Never has this truth been more important than today when we are engaging in much reckless talk about the necessity of balancing the budget.
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IT IS CURIOUS to read today the writings of the American liberals in the days just before the depression. No matter how realistic they seemed to be, they all had a way of ending in bursts of language that left you blank. Consider, for example, the conclusion of Stuart Chase's pamphlet on "Waste and the Machine Age." Stuart Chase is perhaps the vividest writer of the liberal camp; he has an unusual knack of making statistics take shape as things and people.
The opium of the people—The anti-religious campaign in Russia goes forward steadily, though its character has been much changed of late. As with the work of bringing the peasants into the collective farms, the government found that it had been going too fast and that the zeal of Communists in the villages had led them into undesirable excesses. The new principle is that no church is to be destroyed or put to other uses, unless a majority of the communicants desire it, whether this means leaving it open one year or ten.
