A NEW AMERICA

 AMERICA remains, after Soviet Russia, the most exhilarating country in the world. It is a whirlpool of ideas.

 It has a receptivity to experiment, a passion for discussion, the intensity of which is literally bewildering. No one, I think, can say in what direction it is moving with any certitude. But that its pattern of life is changing at a speed greater than at any previous period is, I think, equally undeniable.

 The crisis has left changes of profound significance. The traditional belief in the leadership of business men has been rudely shaken. The conservatism of the universities has been greatly modified; even at places like Harvard and Yale intellectual leadership is in the hands of 'radical' undergraduates.

 The emphatic note of all significant American literature is one of protest; there is not today in American letters a single figure of any real importance on the conservative side.

 There is an awakening of labor to political consciousness, slow, indeed, but in a new way profound. There is a new zest among the younger generation for public service; Government work as an official has a new prestige value. There is a new sense of the State, a recognition that the old way of laissez-faire is decisively over.

 One constantly has the impression in the United States that its temper is like nothing so much as that of France in the generation before 1789. Doubt of all accepted values, eager exploration of novelty, a general atmosphere of insecurity, the widespread sense that great events are in the making—these are universal. Something new is being made. The one thing we do not know is the nature of the new thing. 

We do not know because, above all, those in America who have learned least from the crisis are its business men and the corporation lawyers who are their dependents. They are the Bourbons of contemporary America.

 Frightened out of their wits in 1933, now that profits are being earned again, their one anxiety is the repression of disturbing ideas. They are terrified even by the mild liberalism of the President. They are angry at any hint of radicalism from a university teacher. They even believe that the New Deal is, as one eminent professor put it, ten out of the twelve points of the Communist Manifesto. They have no programme to meet the problems of the new time. They hate the trade unions. The militancy of the farmer disturbs them greatly.

 One sound thing in America seems to them the immovable conservatism of the Supreme Court. They are beginning to find democracy a very dubious inheritance now that democracy is beginning to think in economic terms.

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THE intellectuals, the mass of the workers outside the old craft trade unions, the bulk of youth, a growing section of the professional classes, not least of them the teachers, are aware that liberal America, the fabled land of opportunity, is in grave danger if big business regains its power.

 There is not, I think, any great increase in a steadfast adherence to Left opinion. But there is a deeper interest in Left opinion, a more constant sense of the importance of its thinking, than at any time in the history of the United States.

 That is not to say that the Left is going to win. Big business in America is very conscious of its power. It is more willing than any similar class in Europe to exhaust all its energy and its ingenuity to maintain it. Its latent Fascist temper is intense: and the vast army of unemployed is a fertile soil for Fascist ideas.

 The appeal of what Mr. Wells calls the "raucous voices," Dr. Townsend, Father Coughlin, and a score of lesser men, to the angry, the disappointed, the half-educated is an important one. Their link with big business is no more apparent to the multitude in America than was Hitler's to big business in Germany, or Mussolini's in Italy.

 There is a new America in the making, even though its contours are undetermined. If liberal America triumphs, it will make a new and fundamental contribution to our common civilisation; for the elements are there of a renaissance of the human spirit.

 But its victory has still to be won, while its defeat might open a grim and ugly chapter in the history of mankind. — By Professor Harold Laski, in 'The Daily Herald,' London.

Daily News (Perth, WA ), 6 April 1937 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article85698508