Charles E. Sorensen—"Cast-Iron Charlie," as Henry Ford called him throughout the forty years of his employment by the Ford Motor Company—was not a man of theory. Like his boss, this Danish patternmaker from Copen­hagen had to see things in action before he could proceed to the gen­eralization. Nevertheless, Soren­sen’s autobiography, My Forty Years with Ford (W. W. Norton. 345 pp. $5.00) offers the clearest anatomical description of the American system of economics since the publication some thirty years ago of Garet Garrett’s The American Omen. It is a book that is worth far more than all the college texts that have been written in the wake of John May­nard Keynes, who did so much to undercut the American theory of the falling price level by institu­tionalizing the opposite—and European—idea of the perpetual inflationary bias.

Theoretically, when Charlie Sorensen went to work for Ford in the early days of the century before Model T was born, all that an American manufacturer had to do to make consumer capitalism work was to follow the books of a few academic pioneers, such as Francis Walker and H. C. Carey. For there, a full generation before Henry Ford began tinkering with a racing car for Barney Oldfield, the American system of economics is shadowed forth. Ricardo and his followers in England had taught the doctrine of the wage fund; they thought the working­man was paid out of profits, which implied a perpetual struggle be­tween investor and laborer for the something extra that makes both saving and working worth-while. In brief, Ricardo, long before Marx, taught the doctrine of the class war. Francis Walker and his American school said it was not so: The American theory was that wages were paid out of production; that if you increased produc­tion, selling more and more items at less and less per item, the wages and the profits would rise together. But no one acted on the Walker theory until Ford came along.

The curious thing about it, as Sorensen’s book shows rather ir­refutably, is that Henry Ford owed precisely nothing to the theo­reticians who had gone before him. Ford was the true untutored genius. What he did was to redis­cover all on his lonesome the several elements which were to make mass production and a con­sumer-oriented capitalism possi­ble. He put the several elements together by a process of trial and error, coming up in the end with a perfect model of what had been dimly apprehended in the acade­micians’ books. Then, long after the first working model of modern capitalism had produced and sold some thirty million cars, Henry Ford hired a man named Samuel Crowther to explain the theory of what had been done. The explana­tion, says Charlie Sorensen, was wholly after the fact, and the fact itself owed far less to logical processes than Ford himself wished to believe.

Interchangeable Parts

The production of interchange­able parts was already an old story when Ford began dreaming of a cheap car to fit the average Ameri­can’s pocketbook. Eli Whitney and the Connecticut gunmakers had been producing rifles and Colt re­volvers by the interchangeable unit system for years before Henry Leland first applied the principle in Michigan to the construction of Cadillacs. Ford took the inter­changeable unit system out of the Detroit air. But mass production required an automatically timed flow of parts to the right place at the right time, and there was noth­ing much in the Detroit air to show Ford what to do about this until he hired a man named Walter Flanders. This wild man, who stayed with Ford only twenty months, had original ideas about the arrangement of machines. Put­ting the interchangeable unit sys­tem together with the Flanders‘ notions, Sorensen and others at Ford finally came up with the mov­ing assembly line. It was indige­nous to the Ford plant, but Ford himself did not invent it; he merely sponsored it—which Charlie Sorensen says is glory enough.

Assembly Lines

In his arrangement of work Ford might have saved himself a lot of trouble if he had only been acquainted with Frederick W. Tay­lor who first tried out the tech­niques of time-motion study at the Midvale Steel Company. But no­body at the Ford Company had ever heard of Taylor when Ford and Sorensen were setting up mov­ing production lines at the High­land Park plant in 1913. According to Sorensen, Taylor was highly surprised in 1914 to hear that the Ford Company "had undertaken to install the principles of scientific management without the aid of ex­perts."

It was more trial and error that led Henry Ford on from his inde­pendent discovery of Taylorism to an equally independent adumbra­tion of the theory of consumer capitalism. When Ford first con­ceived the desire to make a cheap car for the multitudes, he wasn’t much concerned about the origins of mass purchasing power. Pre­sumably he had farmers, the tradi­tional dwellers in rural isolation, in mind when he thought of an ex­panding market for the Tin Lizzy. When Ford first decided on the $5-day for his workers, it was as an incentive move. The profits were piling up so fast as a result of as­sembly line production that it was only reasonable to suppose that the Ford labor force would become dis­gruntled if it didn’t share in the vastly increased take.

So the $5-day was instituted as an efficiency lure, not as something to make mass consumption possi­ble. But mass consumption came inevitably in its wake. Ford himself was soon startled to discover that he hadn’t provided parking space for cars at the new Highland Park plant. It was long after his men had started driving Model Ts to work that Ford got his literary Man Friday, Mr. Crowther, todraw the inevitable deductions. Thus the optimistic principles which had first been set down in the eighteen seventies by econo­mist Francis Walker were almost accidentally proved in the practice of a man who probably never in his life heard of Walker.

Books Have Their Place

Henry Ford is famous for his opinion that the greater part of history is "bunk." But this was the opinion of a tinkerer who learned only from his hands and his eyes. It didn’t matter much in the case of Henry Ford, who happened to be a genius. But books have their place—and it would not have hurt if Ford had been able to read the literature which effectively prophe­sied his own emergence.

The point is worth making these days precisely because Mr. Soren­sen’s story of the origins of the Ford system is not bunk. My Forty Years with Ford is something that should be read again and again, in workshops, in union offices, in the schools, and in whatever rooms pol­iticians use when they have oppor­tunity to do a little homework. The sad thing is that the lesson of the Ford Company, which was elo­quently set forth in 1928 in Gar­rett’s The American Omen, is be­ing forgotten by the very Ameri­cans who have profited most from its application. Instead of letting capitalism work its miracles in the shape of lower and lower prices for the consumer as mass production spins on past the "breakeven" point, the politicians are commit­ted to the rule that the savings of the American system belong to them, to be siphoned off in taxes. Wages still go up as unit produc­tion costs are slashed. But the con­sumer no longer gets his share of the benefit, save as the politician sees fit to dole it out to him as fed­eral aid to this and that.

Even so, the Ford system goes on working. It may be surmised that the only reason the past twenty years of inflation haven’t been absolutely ruinous is to be found in the triumph of American technology, which has hauled the dollar back from the abyss by forc­ing a continually mounting plenty. Sorensen’s book is a first-rate case study of how this technology works even in the face of transcendent difficulties. It is also an intensely human study of a man who had his idiosyncracies and blind spots. Al­together, it is the book of the year.

Liberty Hyde Bailey: An In­formal Biography By Philip Dorf. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 259 pp. $3.50.

Reviewed By F. A. Harper

Of the countless people who wan­der over hill and dale, occasionally there is one whose course becomes a path; then a road; then a high­way.

The influence of great minds is like that. Many of us were at­tracted to Cornell to study under one particular man who himself had been attracted there to study under another man. The other man was Liberty Hyde Bailey, one of the world’s greatest botanists.

Not every biography of a scien­tist would be worthy of note from the standpoint of liberty. But Bailey’s is worthy for several rea­sons.

For one thing, his unique name—Liberty. His grandfather, a Ver­mont abolitionist of the early nine­teenth century, had proclaimed on the birth of a son: "Call him Lib­erty—for all shall be free." And that name was passed on to the grandson.

Liberty Hyde Bailey was an ex­treme individualist who exempli­fied the deepest purposes of lib­erty. An ordered, command society can never chart the course for great minds. All it can do is to paralyze them. But under liberty, the work of men like Bailey bene­fits us all.

His was a fascinating life. As a boy, he played with the Indians in frontier Michigan. Later he be­came the close friend not only of remote plants but also of men all over the world.

At an early age Bailey laid out his life’s plan in skeleton form. He planned to learn for twenty-five years, teach for twenty-five years, and then "do what I wish" for twenty-five years.

He entered the third phase of his plan a bit late. It seems that when he was forty-five he had re­luctantly accepted the Deanship at Cornell, but promised to serve only ten years. Ten years later he walked into a faculty meeting, an­nounced his retirement, and left the room. Of this event, one who was present said: "We were all too stricken to speak, and I look back on it as one of the most dramatic experiences of my life."

The end of his great career did not come, however, at the three ­quarter-century mark. Bailey had once said in a commencement ad­dress delivered in his seventy-third year: "On that day that I lose my enthusiasm, let me die." His continuing enthusiasm is evi­denced by the fact that in his ninety-second year he was prepar­ing for one of his numerous expe­ditions to study palms in Africa, and to visit fourteen countries. As a result of an accident in New York, he broke his leg. When he fi­nally came to realize that he would never recover enough to make the trip, his enthusiasm faded for the first time. Finally, on Christmas night of the ninety-eighth year of his life, there passed away a man who had upheld liberty in science as few have ever done—"for all shall be free."  

The Passing of American Neu­trality, 1937-1941 By Donald F. Drummond. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, vii. 409 pp. $7.50.

Reviewed By Harry Elmer Barnes

Professor Drummond’s volume de­scribes the most ominous transi­tion in American history—from the loss of the benign neutrality, international modesty, and pacific inclinations which safely guided our foreign relations for more than a century and kept us free from any major foreign war dur­ing this period, to the fervent espousal of world meddling, give away, and "perpetual war for per­petual peace."

This transition should be espe­cially impressive and appalling to libertarians who are opposed to state enterprise, inflation, and in­creasing debt, as it has brought every one of these in its wake.

The decline of political morals after a decade and a half of official mendacity in regard to world af­fairs and their domestic aftermath has led to the toleration of unprecedented graft and corruption in public life.

The economic changes have been even more menacing. Military managerialism, a vast enlargement of statism, inflation, rising living costs, currency depreciation, an as­tronomical public debt, and in­creasingly crushing taxation have been among the penalties exacted of the United States by our inter­ventionism. Our economy is being undermined and our national re­sources exhausted.

The financial balance-sheet dra­matically underlines the fantastic cost of interventionism. It has been estimated that the total cost of our interventionism since 1941 has been in excess of $750 billion dollars, as compared with all fed­eral public expenditures of $180 billions from 1789 to 1941. Be­tween 1941 and 1953, Roosevelt and Truman each spent approxi­mately twice as much as all na­tional expenditures down to the year 1941.

It will be evident that the evils and burdens brought to this coun­try by our interventionist Liberals since 1940 vastly exceed the dam­age done to the country through the machinations and subversive actions of the communists during this same period.

Some may seek to brush this off by holding that such is the cost of actual war. But the vast expendi­tures continue in so-called peace time. The militaristic system is being made permanent as politicians have learned the technique of link­ing economic "prosperity" and po­litical tenure to the indefinite pro­longing of cold and phony warfare and the vast military expenditures associated with it.

Professor Drummond’s book tells how we lost our neutrality and the truly peaceful policy which controlled our foreign relations and limited our public expendi­tures for a century and a half, al­though he recounts the story with approval rather than reproach.

A Carnival of Buncombe H. L. Mencken, edited by Mal­colm Moos. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press. 370 pp. $4.50.

Reviewed By Edmund A. Opitz

This is not the most profound book on politics ever penned, but it is probably the most fun. There are sixty-nine pieces here, se­lected by Huntington Cairns from the hundreds of political articles Mencken wrote for the Baltimore Sun in the years 1920-1936. Mencken was at the top of his form during this period, and al­though he professed to despise pol­itics—apart from its entertain­ment value—he would have been desolated if kept away from it. He had a constitutional antipathy to frauds, and his preoccupation with the gorgeous specimens that abounded in American politics dur­ing his lifetime brought out some of his best writing. He was a shrewd reporter who reacted vig­orously and wrote with a complete honesty that spared no one.

This is the second book to be published after Mencken’s death. The previous one, Minority Re­port, is a miscellany of warmed-over Mencken written after his prime, and better forgotten. A Carnival of Buncombe, on the other hand, is the cream of Mencken’s best.

It was not the "honest imbecil­ity" of the ordinary politician that sent Mencken’s temperature up to 103; it was the do-gooder, the right-thinker, and the forward-looker in politics—the "resilient, sneaking, limber, oleaginous, hol­low, and disingenuous" fellow who purveyed "an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest and ferocious." This was the type which had come to dominate the American political scene since the turn of the century, as Mencken viewed it. "One of the greatest defects of a democracy," he wrote, "is that it forces every candidate for office, even the highest, into frauds and chicaneries that are wholly incompatible with the most elementary decency and honor. In proportion as he is intelligent and honest, his candidacy is hopeless." This trend appears inevitable in a mass democracy where politicans must flatter the mob to get elected: "The first and last aim of the politician is to get votes, and the saf­est of all ways to get votes is to appear to the plain man to be a plain man like himself, which is to say, to appear to him to be happily free from any heretical treason to the body of accepted platitudes—to be filled to the brim with the flabby, banal, childish notions that challenge no prejudice and lay no burden of examination upon the mind."

This trend in American political life carries with it two major con­sequences: the deterioration of the two party system, and the decline of the people’s liberties. If no candi­date for high office can get elected by standing on his principles, par­ties erected on distinctive political principles will tend to disappear. This is inevitable, and evidence for it is the merging of the two major parties. "Both," Mencken writes, "have lost their old vitality, all their old reality; neither, as it stands today, is anything more than a huge and clumsy machine for cadging jobs. They do not carry living principles into their successive campaigns; they simply grab up anything that seems likely to make votes. The old distinctions between them have all faded out, and are now almost indiscernible." As for personal freedom, it is steadily being liquidated: "Laws multiply in the land. They grow more and more idiotic and oppres­sive. Swarms of scoundrels are let loose to harass honest men. The liberties that the Fathers gave us are turned into mockeries…. Be­tween Wilson and his brigades of informers, spies, volunteer detec­tives, perjurers and complaisant judges, and the Prohibitionists and their messianic delusion, the liberty of the citizen has pretty well vanished in America…I begin to see signs that, deep down in their hearts, the American people are growing tired of government by fiat and denunciation. Once they reach the limit of endurance, there will be a chance again for the sort of Americanism that civilized men can be proud of…." This, written in 1920, is a tribute to Mencken’s prescience. On the issue of indi­vidual liberty he never faltered, even when his own freedom was not directly involved.

Mencken could recognize and re­spect a man when he saw one, even if he abhorred the man’s ideas. Thus it should surprise no one that he voted for LaFollette in 1924. Mencken affirmed he would go to the gallows arguing that socialism was a swindle. Nevertheless, he stated: "I shall vote for him (La-Follette) unhesitatingly, and for a plain reason: he is the best man in the running, as a man. There is no ring in his nose. Nobody owns him. Nobody bosses him. Nobody even advises him. Right or wrong, he has stood on his own bottom, firmly and resolutely, since the day he was first heard of in politics, bat­tling for his ideas in good weather and bad, facing great odds gladly, going against his followers as well as with his followers, taking his own line always and sticking to it with superb courage and resolu­tion."

Mencken had his blind spots, and some of them glare. But in the po­litical arena he saw clearly. He was the outsider viewing his contem­poraries with good-natured contempt for their excited absorption in the shenanigans of politics. Even in his Notes on Democracy, the nearest thing to a political creed, his common sense kept breaking through to keep him sane. No political structure or pro­gram has the solidity to bear the assorted faiths and loyalties which people in the twentieth century—lacking a proper object of faith and loyalty—entrust to it. To the extent that a cure for this condi­tion is possible, A Carnival of Bun­combe is a long step in the right direction. A new object of faith and loyalty completes the cure, and one is free to look beyond Mencken for that.            

 Fountain of Justice: A Study in the Natural Law By John C. H. Wu. New York: Sheed & Ward. 287 pp. $3.75.

Reviewed by Edmund A. Opitz

A statutory law is established by legislative enactment. Whatever authority it may have derives from the power of the legislating body to enforce it, plus the public opin­ion which approves it. For the le­gal positivists there is not and need not be any other sanction, but there are philosophies of law which take issue with this conclusion.

Public opinion may be unin­structed or misinformed and the legislators wicked men—in which case the statute enacted by the one and approved by the other may be a vicious and unjust law. But when we speak in these terms, we intro­duce another dimension into the argument—the speculative and metaphysical dimension which the positivists seek to exclude. The idea that eternal and immutable principles are written into the na­ture of things and that just laws are those which correspond to these principles is part of the Higher Law background of Ameri­can constitutional theory. The con­cept of "Nature and Nature’s God" as the ultimate sanction for political bodies and their deliverances was widely held by the Founding Fathers. The alternative notion that the supremacy of the Consti­tution rests on its root age in popu­lar will represents a comparatively late outgrowth in American consti­tutional theory.

These are large topics which do not admit of any easy settlement, and they are of enormous impor­tance to every libertarian. For if any elected body, at the behest of some "majority," may rightfully pass any law it pleases, then a law curbing the liberty of a minority has the same ethical sanction as a law which seeks to protect it. In practice, and perhaps in theory as well, this is equivalent to eliminat­ing ethical considerations from the legal field, which is to sanctify force.

Dr. Wu combines the wisdom of two social heredities—that of China and that of the West. He has written a learned but readable book on the natural law and com­mon law background of the Ameri­can political tradition which pays full tribute to the theological and religious premises which under-gird that tradition.