Yes, No, Perhaps

NEW FRONTIERS--Henry A. Wallace-- Reynal & Hitchcock ($2).

THE CHALLENGE TO LIBERTY--Herbert Hoover--Scribner ($1.75).

FREEDOM VERSUS ORGANIZATION--Bertrand Russell--Norton ($3.50).

It is small news when a professional writer publishes another book, but in this second year of the U. S. New Deal it is news when a busy Secretary of Agriculture and an ex-President of the U. S. each write one. Secretary Wallace dictated his 83,000 words into a dictaphone, finished the first draft in three months. Ex-President Hoover simmered over his 50,000 words for a year. As books, Bertrand Russell's is incomparably the best of the three, but more readers will prefer to hear what Authors Wallace and Hoover have to say for and against the New Deal rather than listen to the lucid skepticism of an outlander. Well aware of the wind's direction, the Book-of-the-Month Club has chosen both New Frontiers and The Challenge to Liberty as its October selection. All three books run according to predictable form. For a new deal in government Wallace says Yes; Hoover, No; Russell, Perhaps.

Though to many a stanch Republican Henry Agard Wallace is a fire-breathing radical, he thinks of himself as a "middleaged, middle-course" person. New Frontiers, written with enthusiastic garrulity, is an argumentatively factual account-rendered of his stewardship so far, his hopes, plans for the future. He believes the new social machinery, such as AAA, "just as important" as the invention of the automobile. Chief objective of U. S. government in the next ten years, says he, should be "so to manage the tariff, and the money system, to control railroad interest rates; and to encourage price and production policies that will maintain a continually balanced relationship between the income of agriculture, labor, and industry." To those who want to keep government out of business he retorts: "The hard facts are that for years government has been in business, and business in government, to a point where it is impossible to untangle the mess." He defends crop destruction only as a necessary emergency expedient, declaring : "To have to destroy a growing crop is a shocking commentary on our civilization."

Author Wallace, who sees "the paradox of want amid plenty," thinks that government and business both will have to catch up to a new economics, in which unbridled competition will be a dead letter. As he hopefully envisages the future U. S. society, it will "recognize competitive individualists and competitive nations and deal with them, as the anachronisms they are, treating them kindly, firmly, and carefully."

Perhaps because he wrote his book hurriedly and under high pressure, Author Wallace's example of money as a medium of exchange adds to the mystery of an already mysterious subject: "When properly working, it can be used satisfactorily to transfer labor of an American farmer in the year 1910 to a European laboring man in the year 1914, and vice versa."

An unready writer, Herbert Hoover would be inarticulate without the cliches of politics. Written with obviously frowning care, The Challenge to Liberty is thick with such muddy passages as this: "Today, these complexities, added to the aftermaths of war, loom large, and the voices of discouragement join with the voices of other social faiths to assert that an irreconcilable conflict has arisen in which Liberty must be sacrificed upon the altar of the Machine Age." Liberals will be surprised to hear Herbert Hoover speaking in defense of Liberalism but will soon discover that what he means by Liberalism is the old U.S. of "rugged individualism." Says he :

"Those amateur sociologists who are misleading this nation by ignoring the biological foundations of human action are as far from common sense as an engineer who ignores physics in bridge building. . . . For at least the next several genera tions we dare not wholly abandon self-interest as a component of motive forces to initiative, to enterprise, to leadership."

He sides with the business as against the governmental executive : "The man ager's restless pillow has done more to advance the practical arts than all the legislation upon the statute books."

Author Hoover thinks the New Deal a lot of dangerous nonsense; all business needs is confidence that the Bill of Rights is still in force. "Recovery from this depression is inevitable, though it may be slowed up by government policies. . . . If confidence were restored in the securities of Liberty we should move forward irresistibly." Though he does not believe that revolution has yet "swept the United States . . . there are some who are trying to bring it about." With real, unconsciously revolutionary passion he prophesies: "The spark of liberty in the mind and spirit of man cannot be long extinguished; it will break into flames that will destroy every coercion which seeks to limit it."

Author Russell, who has always held aloof from the political arena, takes a longer, more objective view of the argument than either Secretary Wallace or Mr. Hoover. A radical, he is also a scientist and a philosopher. To get a proper perspective of the debate between freedom and organization, he goes back 100 years, writes a history of political change from 1814 to 1914. No believer in "scientific" history, or in the Carlylean doctrine of heroes either, he has made his book a judicious blend of historical analysis and biography. His lucid irony does not prevent him from stating many a downright unusual opinion. Of Metternich (whom he calls a pompous prig) he says: "His fundamental political principle was simple, that the Powers that be are ordained of God, and must therefore be supported on pain of impiety. The fact that he was the chief of the Powers that be gave to this principle, in his eyes, a luminous self-evidence which it might otherwise not have possessed."

Author Russell translates into plain English many a little-known name and cloudily-understood theory--the Benthamites and other English philosophical radicals, Marx, dialectical materialism, surplus value. In the wide conclusion he draws from his wide subject he considers nothing so parochial as a U. S. New Deal. But in his capacity as observer he reports that economic nationalism is the order of the day. "Organization to the utmost within the State, freedom without limit in the relations between States." Only international organization will save the world from calamity. "The same causes that produced war in 1914 are still operative, and, unless checked by international control of investment and of raw material, they will inevitably produce the same effect, but on a larger scale."

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