Books: Impolite Commentator

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A JOURNAL OF THESE DAYS—Albert Jay Nock—Morrow ($2.75). Of the few One of the few writers who hold themselves aloof from the contemporary scene, Albert Jay Nock is one of the loftiest. Like the anarchist who enjoyed his freedom from all political allegiances, Bystander Nock is in the comfortable position of running no danger that his superior wisdom in economics, politics et al. will be put to a test in practice. Not given to the loud laugh, he has spent much of his time recording in his journal his amusement and disgust at his fellow-countrymen's behavior. Unfriendly to authority, he has a rooted conviction that the leaders of U. S. democracy are almost invariably charlatans or rascals. He once voted for Jefferson Davis in a Presidential election, on the principle that a first-rate dead man is better than a second-rate live one. Of President Roosevelt he says: "[He] is no Cincinnatus; his manifest scheming for the job gives his measure." NRAdministrator Johnson he calls "that vulgar ruffian Johnson, Roosevelt's strong-arm man." He finds it "hard to imagine a more despicable institution than our press. ... All that makes me suspect there may be something in Technocracy is that the New York Times and Herald Tribune ridicule it. If they ignored it altogether, I would be practically sure it was a pretty sound thing."

"Agin the government'' in every possible way, Heretic Nock makes some general observations that may well shock traditional minds. "A pretty Frenchwoman is worth mention; I never saw more than three that I can remember." Disbelievers in capital punishment will applaud his shrewdness: "When kidnapping was made a capital crime, probably not a single legislator realized that he was voting to put a premium on murder, and to provide a direct encouragement to lynching." A life- long believer in the late Henry George's single tax, he has "never propagandized for it, because our people would not know what to do with it if they had it."

Like many another native critic, however, Nock is quick to defend the U. S. against "superficial" foreign criticism. "We have the finest things to be found anywhere, and the finest people in the world, plenty of them. . . . But the point is that with us such persons are wholly ineffectual; they have no influence; our society does not at all take its tone from them, directly or indirectly. ..." What riles him is such obtrusive phenomena as book-reviewers, who "have no idea whatever of the classification of books ... or of what makes them so. They also have no idea that a fourth-rate book may sometimes be exceedingly good, and well worth reading. . . ."

A Journal of These Days is third-rate but good of its kind, well worth reading.