Democracy in the U. S.

THE AMERICAN STAKES--John Chamberlain--Carrick & Evans ($2.75).

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE--J. P. Mayer --Viking ($3).

Many observers devoutly agree that the year 1940 would be a good year for a lot of people to get some clear ideas about "Democracy." Two very different books on this grand topic are John Chamberlain's and J. P. Mayer's. Chamberlain's is a businesslike analysis of the way things in the U. S. appear to an alert young man who has humane hopes and unusually good information. The other is a scholar's account of another young man who wrote about the U. S. 100 years ago.

Limited. Author of a history of the Progressive movement (Farewell to Reform, 1932), staff writer on FORTUNE, editor of Harper's monthly book pages, frequent contributor to the New Republic, busy, boyish John Chamberlain reduces the august subject of The State to simple, street-corner terms. The state originated as a "strict racket"; it has progressed by becoming a "limited racket," i.e., a democracy. Government he sees as the broker between competing pressure groups, the New Deal government as a fair attempt to even up the competitors.

Skimming through history and throwing off such names as Proudhon, Bakunin, Sorel, Kropotkin, like a shower of sparks, Chamberlain contrasts the lively diversity of pre-war political theory with the postwar hypnosis of Marxism. He thinks most liberal thinking since 1933 has been "pretty silly" because merely a reaction from that spell. As for effective liberal organizations, the Democratic Party has been the best of a bad lot: "a loose federation of southern cotton snobs, western dirt farmers (the real heirs of Jefferson) and the machines of Jersey City's Frank Hague, Chicago's Pat Nash and Ed Kelly, the Irish bosses of Boston. . . ." President Roosevelt, Chamberlain declares, "always went from the worse to the better until the European war distracted him." On this point he really lets fly. "It is far easier to lecture Hitler than to fight for a repeal of the poll tax in Mississippi*. . ."

The U. S. stakes, in John Chamberlain's opinion, are hemisphere stakes. He argues that no matter what property changes hands in the rest of the world, the U. S. will still be sitting pretty. "Whether Japan or Holland or Britain 'owns' the East Indies, themine and plantation owners of that part of the world must sell in Akron or Pittsburgh or else face prolonged depression."

For all his breezy drive and honest insight into immediate realities, Chamberlain does not plumb certain problems: how the U. S. can be sure of security in this hemisphere without some form of imperialist policy towards Latin America, how U. S.industrial production is to be increased except by a vague hope for some new "prime mover" such as the railroads once were.

Profound? From John Chamberlain to Alexis de Tocqueville is a stratosphere flight. Son of a nobleman who barely escaped the guillotine in the French Revolution, himself an aristocrat by instinct, de Tocqueville was a slim, small, long-nosed, not particularly well-read young man of 30 when the first volumes of his Democracy in America were greeted as a dazzling work of political philosophy. That was in 1835. The book has been a classic ever since, and like most classics has received a classic criticism--by that judicious Englishman, James Bryce, whose study of U. S. politics (The American Commonwealth} appeared in 1888.

Biographer Mayer, editor of a forthcoming complete edition of de Tocqueville, wants to present a new interpretation of the author, and in doing so he slurs over Bryce's criticism. Yet that criticism still has weight. Bryce pointed out that de Tocqueville's facts, gained in ten months of travel in America, were "rather the illustrations than the sources of his conclusions"; that his knowledge of colonial and English history was deficient; that he wrote about America to draw lessons for France; that his book was a work of art as much as a work of science. In two dry sentences, Bryce summarized de Tocqueville's views on one large subject: "It [American Democracy] is eminently ill-fitted to conduct foreign policy. Fortunately it has none."

What was de Tocqueville's distinction? As Biographer Mayer sees it, it was profundity. A cool and detached observer, devoted to truth with a religious devotion, master of a logical style modeled on that of Pascal, a psychologist whose cutting portrait of Napoleon III is itself a masterpiece, de Tocqueville wrote not as a partisan of Democracy but as the foreboding analyst of a vast movement which he saw in progress from the 11th Century and believed inevitable for mankind--the movement toward equality. He was what he called himself--"a liberal of a new kind."

The process which de Tocqueville dreaded was the victory, in the name of democracy, of equality over freedom, of a universal "strict racket." From his study of the U. S. and France, he deduced that "the sole remaining alternative lies between evils henceforth inevitable; that the question is not whether aristocracy or democracy can be maintained, but whether we are to live under a democratic society, devoid indeed of poetry and greatness, but at least orderly and moral, or under a democratic society, lawless and depraved, abandoned to the frenzy of revolution, or subjected to a yoke heavier than any of those which have crushed mankind since the fall of the Roman empire."

To the sunny late 19th Century and to James Bryce in particular, such an austere view of the future naturally seemed either mystical or uncalled for. In 1940, as Mayer's book shows, it seems relevant to the issues underlying such books as John Chamberlain's. By a new use of de Tocqueville's letters and a careful, though brief, account of his work as a writer and statesman, Mayer proves it to have been the basic concern of his life.

*A tax of $2 on every voter. Result in practice: disenfranchisement of many Negroes and poor whites.

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