The "liberals" of the Brandeis generation were firmly convinced that Bigness (which they usually spelled with a capital B) was a "curse." It was a curse because it tended to concentrate power. And it was a curse because it resulted in sluggishness and inefficiency.

The Brandeiseans generalized from the facts around them. But at this point in time one can see that they generalized altogether too hastily. They didn’t distinguish sharply between two types of pow­er. The big economic unit that op­erated on its own, without govern­ment support in the way of sub­sidies, tariffs, or police protection for "rackets," could hardly be vicious. To the extent that it served the public, by attracting good workers and by dispensing useful products at a low price, it was a blessing. To the extent that it became sluggish and inefficient, it was bound to yield ground to the lean, hard newcomer in the field.

On the other hand, the big eco­nomic unit that acted with the power of government behind it could be a menace. But such units, today, are few and far between. It is the small unit—the cotton and wheat and peanut farmer, the building trades contractor with a "deal" at City Hall—that shelters itself today behind the strong arm of the law. And it is the govern­ment-fostered multi-company labor union, not the big manufacturer, that can successfully fix the price of what it has to offer in the mar­ket place.

The distinctions that tended to escape the Brandeisean generation are uppermost in three recent books that zero in on the subject of business size. To Chairman Roger Blough of the United States Steel Corporation, whose Free Man and the Corporation (McGraw-Hill, 126 pp., $4.50) grew out of a series of McKinsey Foundation lectures delivered at the Colum­bia University Graduate School of Business, the "voluntary associa­tion," no matter how big, can hardly do wrong for very long without losing the sanctions that have attracted people to it. To James C. Worthy, vice-president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., author of Big Business and Free Men (Harper, 205 pp., $4.00), the big busi­ness that departs from "human values" will find it cannot operate in the predominantly ethical Amer­ican atmosphere. And to Osborn Elliott, the managing editor of Newsweek who interviewed some two hundred businessmen for his Men at the Top (Harper, 320 pp., $3.95), the big corporation "ty­coon" is such a various, individ­ualistic, and unpredictable animal that it would be senseless to imag­ine any large number of his spe­cies having the docility that is needed to concert a conspiratorial action.

Unstandardized Businessmen

Mr. Elliott’s book is, for the most part, a what-do-they-eat, how­ do-they-talk, where-did-they-come ­from study in human interest. It yields few generalizations other than the big one that the Ameri­can businessman is far from a standardized product. For exam­ple, if Mills Lane of Atlanta, Georgia, president of the biggest bank in the Southeast, wants to beat a competitor into a new terri­tory, he will open up an office in a log cabin while his own architects are busy with the blueprints for a more permanent building. And when Crawford Greenewalt, presi­dent of du Pont, wants to amuse himself, he is apt to sneak off with a camera to photograph hummingbirds. Though good for organiza­tions, these are not stereotyped "organization men."

Among the individualistic ty­coons interviewed by Mr. Elliott, U. S. Steel’s Roger Blough emerges as a very gentle scholar. Time was when U. S. Steel—the "corpora­tion"—did seem to prove the Brandeisean contention that big­ness must result in sluggishness. Where it once did two-thirds of the nation’s business in steel, it slowly permitted its competitors—Bethlehem, Republic, and the rest—to cut themselves bigger and bigger pieces of the total steel pie. While the "corporation" may have done this purposefully, with one eye cocked on the antitrust watchdogs in the Department of Justice, the slide could have be­come disastrous if it had become a habit. But Bigness, in the case of U. S. Steel, proved capable of developing its own internal anti­bodies. And one of these anti­bodies was Roger Blough, the farmer, schoolteacher, and lawyer who specializes in the soft ap­proach.

A Big Service

In his own "soft-sell" book Mr. Blough argues that the American corporation, like any other volun­tary association, can prosper only as it serves the purposes of those who freely join it—or who freely buy the products it offers. If it does not pay good dividends, it will not attract investors. If it does not provide its workers with good "labor-extending" tools and make them happy while using them, it will tend to lose its good men to competitors both inside and outside its own type of business. If it does not watch its pricing policy, it will soon discover that German and Belgian steelmakers, say, are taking its barbed wire or tinplate customers away from it. And if it does not support higher education, it may find itself with a deficient supply of technicians and executives in the coming gen­eration.

Mr. Blough is not impressed with the argument that the big must inevitably eat up the small as our industrial development goes its merry way. As he notes, there are 4.3 million "production groups" of all sizes in the U. S. These "vol­untary productive groups" have at least 13 million individual owners who are either stockholders or proprietors. Some 900,000 of the 4.3 million "production groups" are incorporated. Each year wit­nesses a weeding out of the more inefficient production groups; in 1957, for example, 332,000 units shut up shop. But in the same year 365,000 new groups came "in." With the continued forma­tion of small units at the bottom of the business pyramid, the prof­its of the big corporations have represented a declining share of our national income during the past thirty years. As for the steel business itself, U. S. Steel has in­creased its capacity more than two-and-one-half times in a half-century. But during this same fifty-year span, the competitors of U. S. Steel have multiplied their capacity nearly seven times.

U. S. Steel, under Roger Blough, has coped with the problem of in­ternal bigness by centralizing its policy-making and by decentral­izing its administration and its operations. And it has sought to give its individual workers a feel­ing of both creativity and safety within the organization, mean­while leaving them alone to be "citizen men" as they see fit out­side of their working hours.

All of which brings Mr. Blough very gingerly to the topic of the big compulsory multi-company union. The multi-company union, he says, tends to ignore "the need for a production unit to compete as a cohesive whole." Where some companies have a productivity that would enable them to pay higher wages and still compete "as a whole," it does not follow that all companies can meet the same wage scale, particularly in a period when prices can no longer be pushed higher with impunity.

The Ethics of Mass Marketing

Mr. Worthy’s Big Business and Free Men is similar to Mr. Blough’s book in its general outline. But, where Mr. Blough tends to illus­trate his points by citing examples from the steel industry, Mr. Worthy ranges all over the lot, drawing on his own experience in the Department of Commerce and from a wide acquaintance with management literature. He argues that American industry developed in a certain moral climate, and that it must stick to "Judeo-Chris­tian" concepts if it is to prosper. The "mass market," he says, is an ethical concept even more than it is an economic; it rests on the notion that everybody ought to consume. "The American factory system," he says by way of am­plification, "grew up within an economy in which workers, con­sumers, and the public were all the same people." It was not so in England, where the workers lived in Manchester and the consumers and the "public" might be in India, in Buenos Aires, or in Timbuktu.

Another – difference between England and America resided in the nature of the labor market it­self. Because of the scarcity of workers in America, we had to make "better use of the limited supply of technically trained peo­ple." To "spread these people thinner," we developed labor-sa^y­ing—or, rather, "labor-extending"—devices. As our "cost of labor" went down because of "labor-ex­tending" tools, individual wages rose. And the mass market became a possibility.

Mr. Worthy is critical of the "scientific management" movement because of its distrust of sponta­neity. He thinks that managerial paternalism, trade unionism, and the Welfare State are all manifes­tations of the same animus against individual responsibility and cre­ativity. He supports the profit-sharing plan of his own company, Sears, Roebuck, not for reasons of economics or charity, but because of its symbolic value; it generalizes an "attitude of pride" throughout the organization, and thus serves as a morale-building cement. The important thing about the "pride generalizing" device, he says, is neither "technique" nor "ritual." It is the "spirit" behind it. Dif­ferent companies will use different devices, but every company must find some workable pride-creating "symbol" if it hopes to live in a time when the big multi-company union stands ready to exploit any manifestation of employee dis­satisfaction.

Mr. Worthy proclaims himself an anti-conservative, but it is note­worthy that his own type of liber­alism is not that of most self-pro­claimed liberals of the modern breed, who are pushovers for stat­ist solutions. For example, Mr. Worthy would tackle unemploy­ment not by federal "tax and spend" methods but by modifying the tax laws to "encourage capital formation." The businessman’s ef­fort, he says, "should be directed toward finding or developing" non­governmental solutions wherever possible, and "applying them with vigor and effectiveness." As a pro­fessional public relations man, Mr. Worthy is perhaps over impressed with the uses of semantics. But when he calls on businessmen to show "greater initiative in putting forth proposals" of their own in­stead of waiting to react "to the proposals of others," he is not be­ing semantical, he is being prac­tical. Action, after all, is the best public relations.       

The American Constitu­tion by Herman Pritchett. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Com­pany. 719 pp. $10.75.)

Reviewed by Robert E. Brown

Professor Brown is in the Department of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of Charles Beard and the Constitu­tion: A Critical Analysis of "An Economic Analysis of the Constitution."

Professor Pritchett Has based his book on two fundamental as­sumptions. The first is the state­ment by Charles and William Beard (opposite p. vii) that the theory that the Constitution is a written document is a legal fic­tion, that it cannot be understood by a study of its language and history, that it is what the government and the people who count in public affairs recognize and re­spect, and that it is constantly changing. The second is a refine­ment of the first. The author ac­cepts the statement of Chief Jus­tice Charles Evans Hughes that in a great majority of cases the Con­stitution means what the Supreme Court says it means. So Pritchett has written a book to show how the Supreme Court has inter­preted the Constitution.

If we could give full faith and credit to these assumptions, there would be little to quarrel with in this book on the Constitution. Us­ing the approach of constitutional law rather than constitutional his­tory, the author has done an ex­cellent job of showing how the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution. After a brief history of the background and adoption of the Constitution, Pritchett concerns himself with the structure and powers of the institutions which make up the federal system—national and state governments, the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive—and with the constitutional limita­tions on national and state powers.

The book will be extremely valu­able to students of both constitu­tional history and constitutional law, especially the latter. There are few problems in constitutional law that have not been treated fully. The historians will probably wish that more constitutional his­tory had been included; but in spite of the author’s contention that "the historian cannot re­create history and often cannot even explain it," he has relied heavily on constitutional histori­ans for his background. This could not be otherwise, since all knowl­edge is in a sense historical knowl­edge, and since all the cases that have come before the courts have involved historical investigation.

Granting that the book is valu­able does not mean it should not be read critically. I should like to comment first on the historical aspects of the work, where I am most competent to judge, and then raise some questions about the philosophical basis of the book.

In Part I dealing with the for­mation of the Constitution are to be found some errors that give us an erroneous conception of the Constitution. Unfortunately, Prit­chett probably acquired these er­rors from historians.

For one thing, the French and American Revolutions did not in­troduce the idea of a written con­stitution, at least not in this coun­try. Colonists had long considered their charters as written constitu­tions which safeguarded basic principles. Assemblies and gov­ernors both consulted these docu­ments to find sanction for their acts, and the governors in partic­ular often complained of the re­straints imposed on them by co­lonial constitutions. The Revolu­tion simply allowed Americans to do without interference what they had been accustomed to do.

Secondly, natural rights before the Revolution were "life, liberty, and property," not "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence. He who leaves out the protection of property as a major function of government will not understand American so­ciety before 1787 nor the Consti­tution. A constitution that did not protect property would never have been adopted.

Thirdly, the struggle over rati­fication of the Constitution might have been bitter among the lead­ers of the opposing factions, but it was not very bitter among the people. A great majority of the people were either indifferent or approved of the Constitution. We must remember that as far as we can now judge, the Constitution won a greater popular majority than that enjoyed by Roosevelt in 1936 or Eisenhower in 1952. And if the large number who failed to vote had been very bitter, they probably would have voted against the Constitution.

Uncritical reliance on uncritical historians has led the author into contradictions. He would have us believe (p. 10) that colonial soci­ety was undemocratic because the lower classes were generally ex­cluded from political life by prop­erty and religious qualifications for voting. Then we are to believe that the new state constitutions after 1776 violated the democratic principles of the Declaration of Independence by retaining these qualifications. Yet the state legis­latures, undemocratically elected by a restricted electorate of prop­erty owners, were the cause of the move for the Constitution (p. 12). But on page 29, the author tells us that "property qualifications for voting excluded few from the polls, and that the Constitution was adopted by people who were pri­marily middle-class property own­ers, including farmers." We will not properly understand American constitutional development before 1789 until we realize that it took place in a society composed largely of property owners who could vote.

A final criticism has to do with the philosophical assumptions of the author. Have we reached the point of accepting the Beard gen­eralization that the written docu­ment itself means nothing and that all that matters is what the im­portant people really consider to be the Constitution? If we have, then we are confessing that we are guided only by interests, not by principles. From this it follows naturally that fascists and com­munists have a perfectly valid ar­gument for opposing the Consti­tution by any effective means, since by becoming the important people, they can rightfully say what the Constitution is. Does not such a concept of the Constitution leave us afloat on a boundless and turbulent sea without either com­pass or rudder?

I doubt very much that this has actually been the philosophical basis for our constitutional devel­opment. If it is true that the Con­stitution is what the Supreme Court says it is, it is equally true that the members of the Court must read the Constitution very carefully and are greatly restricted in their actions by what they find there. If the President and Con­gress are constantly changing the Constitution, they, too, do so under its restraining influence. But when the score is added up, and in spite of the many deviations, the funda­mental principles still confronting the Supreme Court in its interpre­tation of the Constitution are the protection of life, liberty, and property.