The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1935-02-18

the
World D.!
By MICHAEL GOLD

- By MICHAEL GOLD ---l
7 EVILS MUMFORD has established him
II self, through many interesting books,
as keen and provocative critic of Amer
lean capitalist culture.
| have watched his work with the per
sonal interest that one feels for the friends Of
ones youth. Years ago. Lewis and and group
of other young New Workers, including, strangely
enough that sterling conservative, Henry Hazlitt,
Of the New York Times, were members OF a kind
Of informal hiking club.
Most Of us worked during the week and Sun
DAYS we would walk down into Staten Island,
stopping in the afternoon at some French tavern
in the midst of green fields, where for fifty cents
you could get seven-course dinner and bottle
of wine.
1t was talk, talk, talk all the day. We were
all in that intense period of ones life when the
mind is not yet formed, and every idea is as chal-
longing as the taunt of private enemy.
Henry Hazlitt had full crop of hair at nine
teen He was an attractive youth who had much
Of the precocity of genius His mind seemed the
keenest and most logical among us, but even then
there was an unnatural caution in all his opinions
This youth was conservative as any New England
grandad Hazlitt never made any of the gener-
GUS mistakes of youth. He was never led into
any of those experiments that make the world
90 forward It was perhaps inevitable that he
would wind up his days in a premature middle
age writing capitalist editorials for the New York
Times
Lewis Mumford was at the other extreme.
volumnous reader and ardent student, he was al
ways on fire, with ideas, a passionate reformer
whose approach to the world was through esthetics
For lad raised under the Ninth Avenue elevated,
he was curiously British, and was saturated with
Ruskin, William Norris and Bernard Shaw. His
talk, poetic, copious and brilliant, an intel
lectual delight, and reminded one Of Shaw
Planning Esthetic UtOpias
I HADN'T the college training or background of
Mumford, but even then sensed strongly the
qucksands of unrealty that lay under the fash
ing stream of his words. Lewis Mumford wanted
a socialist world much as did, but he couldn't
be convinced that it took the working class to
bring it in.
He was forever planning glorious esthetic utopas
that would prove so irresistible to the middle class
that they would shed all their wealth and their
bourgeois habits of mind as in a great camp-meet-
ing revival, and suddenly come to God
But life doesn't work out that way and today
we see many of these esthetc utopians, like
Ezra Pound and Gorham Munson, drifting into
fascism man like Pound uses the same whirl-
ing rhetoric to gorify Mussoni that he once used
in homage to Brancusi. Pound never had faith
in the creative powers of the working class or any
understanding of its historic role. His class snob-
berry proved stronger than his poetic democracy"
and he landed where many of these gentlemen
will be found when the fascist assassins and torture
squads go hunting workers and nteIiectuals-in
the camp of the bandits
Lewis Munford is bitterly anti-fascist, as so
many intellectuals we'll be- without understand
ing that it is even impossible to defeat fascism
without an organized working class. He thinks
you can build house with only the architect
Out of Touch with the Masses
ALL these memories Of Mumford return as the
n result of recent exchange of letters. I should
like to quote a paragraph so of his letter to me-
Il have, think, been growing steadily tougher
ing up, getting frmeri getting better hold upon
both outer and inner worlds since 1925 or there
aboutS; how much of that you have seen haven't
the faintest notion One of the difficulties is that
much of my work gets published in PROFESSIONAL
magazines. To which you will Of course retort
that it is my old habit of being out of touch with
the masses. And to which answer: No, no
honest thought that has grip on reality is ulti-
mately out of touch with the masses.
Il wasn't one of the booze boys that stopped
thinking after the Armistice; wasn't one of the
prosperity boys, who thought heaven and earth
were witnesses to the New Capitalism; in March,
1929, six months before the bust, I said in an
article in the Herald Tribune that the whole pros
perty business was fake, which should deceive
no one. BY the same token didn't suddenly be-
come one of the Communist boys, when the stock
market broke and jobs in advertising agencies got
scarce.
But cannot swallow Marx or Lenin whole
and I think am of service in reaching the en-
gineers and technicians and administrators and
scholars and scientists :"
Socialism Without Workers
Of COURSE Lewis Mumford has been doing
great socialzing job in reaching this class and
breaking the intellectual hold of capitalism on their
minds.
But he still believes you can have Communism
without party that can organize it, or a social
ist world without the workers. Is it enough to-
day that attack capitalism, or attempt to in
spire vague revolutionary mood in the middle
CLASP Whoever does not also teach them the fun
damental truth of socialist politics. that the work