Books: Fervent Sermon

(2 of 2)

Equality is crucial because political reform depends on man's economic independence. Agar is well aware that what the founders of the Republic visualized as economic independence is no longer practical. But he has hope for modern substitutes, for social security, some proprietary relationship between the factory worker and his job, public development projects in backward regions, cooperatives, etc. He hopes that such things may once more produce the independent man whose will is not warped by other men's power over his livelihood.

Civil War. In economic reforms, Agar opposes planning and coercion, praises the attempts of men like Leon Henderson and Thurman Arnold to promote rules of decency in business. Agar also wants, above all, reforms in labor relations. He believes that class consciousness among U.S. industrialists has made U.S. unionism fight a civil war which has been equally degrading to the losing employers and to the victorious unions. Union "rackets," Agar believes, are largely the result of the type of war that employers waged against the unions. So is the demand for the closed shop: the men fear that management will try to break collective bargaining as soon as possible. But Agar points out that unless a man is free to join or to leave his union the union members will be increasingly unable to control the men who run their unions.

Flow of History. Rejecting "liberal optimism" of any kind, Herbert Agar proposes "the hopeful belief that man still has free will and that we can, therefore, save ourselves. But not by substituting promises for moral reform. Not by contemplating a shining future as an alternative to scrubbing some of the dirt off the present. It is impossible to hold moral convictions without believing they must be expressed in action. It is impossible to maintain a great nation on any other basis except that of moral conviction."

A Time for Greatness suffers from the shortcomings of a sermon. But it is also full of common sense. The "liberal optimists" whom Agar condemns will claim Agar as one of their own. Those who think of themselves as "conservative" will think of Agar as a "radical." Radicals will not understand him. Yet with the physical end of American isolation, U.S. history once more enters the flow of history of mankind, and Herbert Agar attempts to give this history meaning in terms of American values.