Today's Tyrant

THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES--Jose Ortega y Gasset--Norton ($2.75).

Though economists now have the floor and philosophers are, as Philosopher Ortega y Gasset admits, anything today rather than philosophers, this penetrating analysis of the world's state is not economic. No fatalist, Ortega y Gasset, searcher for the truth about Western civilization, believes that something may still be done with the truth when it is found. A yea-saver, his gloomiest proph ecy is still hopeful in a sardonic Spanish way: ''Before long there will be heard throughout the planet a formidable cry, rising like the howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking for someone or some thing to take command, to impose an occupation, a duty."

That the world is demoralized he thinks not altogether a bad sign. "Our epoch . . . believes itself more than all the rest, and at the same time feels that it is a beginning. What expression shall we find for it? Perhaps this one: superior to other times, inferior to itself. Strong, indeed, and at the same time uncertain of its destiny; proud of its strength and at the same time fearing it." Most of his book is an analytical arraignment of the mass-mind, tyrant of the age. "The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the right of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the U. S. : 'to be different is to be indecent.' " It is a crowded age, especially in Europe, whose population has increased from 180,000,000 to 460,000,000 since 1800. Ortega y Gasset denies that Europe is being Americanized, says "Americanization" is a worldwide, spontaneous growth.

Making a vital distinction between "mass" and "class," he defines "mass-mind" as the commonplace mind, no matter in what class it is found. The massman is barbarian, only concerned with his own wellbeing, content to plunder civilization, not labor intelligently to continue it. By his definition of "barbarian" Ortega y Gasset covers a multitude of public "leaders": "If anyone in a discussion with us is not concerned with adjusting himself to truth, if he has no wish to find the truth, he is intellectually a barbarian. That, in fact, is the position of the massman when he speaks, lectures or writes." Even highly-trained specialists--scientists, financiers, doctors, engineers--behave like barbarians in spheres outside their specialty. Result: "The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilization."

What distinguishes our age from preceding ones is that "the masses are in revolt," determined to take the world into their own hands. The commonplace has become tyrannical. In former times "the masses asserted no right to intervene in [government] ; they realized that if they wished to intervene they would necessarily have to acquire those special qualities and cease being mere mass." A fierce believer in aristocracy of intellect and character, not of heredity, Ortega, y Gasset calls such organized mass-government as Fascism and Bolshevism "two false dawns . . . mere primitivism." Europe's answer, he thinks, is to build itself into one great state in which, he implies, the massman will no longer dominate.

The Author. Jose Ortega y Gasset is no barbarian specialist. Because he is Professor of Metaphysics at Madrid University it does not follow that he is a mere academician. Like his brilliant colleague Miguel de Unamuno, rector of Salamanca University, but less actively, Ortega y Gasset has long been a Republican, now sits in Spain's Cortes between lectures. His influence as a. writer, philosopher and statesman is felt not only in Spain but throughout the Spanish-speaking world-- a world bigger than Anglo-Saxons often realize. He founded and still edits the Revista de Occidente, Spanish literary and philosophical review.

Inquiring Reporter

THIS COUNTRY OF YOURS -- Morris Markey--Little, Brown ($3).

On the theory that a forest is "simply an accumulation of trees." Reporter Morris Markey "got into a Ford and set out to call" on his countrymen at home. He wanted to know what the U. S. is really like. He traveled 16,000 miles, interviewed hundreds of ordinary U. S. citizens. In this stimulating and depressing report he sets down what he found, draws his conclusions. Some of his findings:

192 houses of ill-fame in two city blocks in Pittsburgh.

A U. S. Senator who got drunk at a club in Chicago, made his stock speech in favor of Prohibition.

A Hollywood party at which he exclaimed, "It's all papier-mache!" poked his finger at the wall, found it was all papier-mache.

A woman on the West Coast who admitted making about $3 an hour by pretending to be stranded in a gasless car, begging a gallon from chivalrous passers by.

Some of his conclusions:

"The press is competent, efficient, clever --and it is without ideal, without basic virtue, without the will to be right in its thinking or bold in its expression of thought.

"... I came to the conclusion that Christianity is hardly to be considered at all as a force in American life, in directing its current or its desires. . . . The ancient virtues are no longer taught in our country. Children are not reared to the stern chant of goodness. They climb haphazardly into adult life. . . . They are not immoral. They are simply without morals, save for those instinctive and defensive morals which survive unconsciously from more harshly ordered generations.

"I cannot think of a time or a place in all history wherein so few restraints, so few rules, were laid upon creative art ists. I cannot think of a time or place wherein the rewards were so certain.

"In every part of the country I found an acceptance of the fact that our government has broken down. . . . We cannot be a nation in the true sense because we have no national ideals, no national aims. . . . And so. ladies and gentlemen, I give you my country: America -- a wilderness crying for a voice."

The Author. Like most professional New Yorkers, Morris Markey (pronounced Markee) reached Manhattan by gradual progression from smaller centres. He was born in Alexandria, Va., schooled in Richmond. He worked in Savannah. New Orleans, Texas, served with the A. E. F. He became a reporter in Atlanta, moved to Newark, crossed the Hudson to enter the city room of the late great New York World. He became the foremost reporter-at-large for The New Yorker, whence Editor Otis L. Wiese lured him to McCall's. Some of This Country of Yours ran in McCall's. His one novel, The Band Plays Dixie, he described as "mighty pretty critically, but didn't buy many biscuits." Tall, blond, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked, he talks well, particularly when stimulated. He thinks the secret of living successfully in New York is a "decent selfishness," has decided that most people go there for "freedom they really have not the faintest notion what to do with."

Cuba Libre

LIBERTY, THE STORY OF CUBA--Horatio S. Rubens--Brewer, Warren & Putnam ($2.50).

Young Lawyer Horatio Seymour Rubens, who in 1893 had a smooth, fat face, a wispy mustache and a confident manner for his 24 years, had not been merely a footballer at C. C. N. Y. He had also made friends with a Cuban classmate, one Gonzalo de Quesada. When Quesada introduced him to Jose Julian Marti, known as "the Master" to U. S.-exiled Cuban revolutionaries, young Rubens caught fire from Marti's fervor, swore he would get in there and fight for Cuban independence. This book is the disarmingly partisan record of how Cuba finally got quit of Spain. His own place in the epic Author Rubens keeps modestly choral: heroes of his tale are Poet Marti, Mulatto General Antonio Maceo, white-bearded, spectacled Maximo Gomez, Cuba herself.

Rubens soon proved his usefulness to the Cuban exiles as a lawyer and was made General Counsel and utility man to the "Cuban Junta." In 1895 Gomez and Mari'i landed in Cuba for the final struggle. Marti was soon killed in a skirmish, but Gomez joined forces with Maceo and spread revolt over the whole island. Meantime the Junta in the U. S. had the job of keeping the Cuban "army" supplied with guns and ammunition. Rubens became an expert organizer of filibustering expedi tions, an equally expert defense lawyer for arrested filibusters (never lost a case). Occasionally he made a voyage himself, but his usefulness was greater on shore. Raising money for the rebel Cubans was part of his job. Biggest single contribution ($30,000) he got from Tammany's Boss Croker. Propaganda was another part. He admits that Hearst and the yellow press were a great help in spreading Spanish atrocity stories, rousing U. S. sympathies for the revolting Cubans. The Junta's agents had to be organized but kept under cover: one of their men was made Pullman conductor on the Manhattan-Tampa run. As the popularity of the Cuban cause increased, Rubens was pestered with volunteers. He let the late Author Stephen Crane make a trip on the filibustering Commodore, which was wrecked. "When I met Crane again. . . . I asked him how one particularly self-important man behaved when all chance of saving the ship seemed gone. 'He reminded me of George Washington,' Crane said, 'first in war, first in peace--and first in the boat.'" On this experience Crane founded his famed story The Open Boat.

Though Rubens does not take the credit of getting the U. S. to declare war on Spain, he did his best to bring it about. When one of his agents got hold of a letter written by Spanish Minister de Lome in which President McKinley was called "a pothouse politician, catering to the rabble," Rubens published the letter, forced de Lome's resignation. Rubens thinks the Maine was blown up by the Spaniards, admits it was probably not "an official act," but suspects that the disgruntled Spanish General "Butcher" Weyler hoped it would happen.

Rubens, not an eye-witness of the Cuban fighting, gives a full, extremely pro-Cuban account of it, compares it favorably with the U. S. War of Independence. According to his figures, the Spanish army finally numbered 200,000 regulars, but it could never come to grips with the ragged, badly-armed Cuban guerrillas, whose policy was never to fight a decisive battle but to wear down the enemy. General Gomez once stated his plan of campaign for the rainy season: "I am going to make the Spanish columns move, move constantly; and I count upon my three important allies, June, July and August." The Spanish answer to guerrilla tactics, says Rubens, was atrocities, of which he presents some gruesome photographs in evidence. General Weyler won his nickname of "Butcher" by his order outlawing all Cubans found outside the Spanish lines, shooting them as rebels. Those within the lines (reconcentrados), says Rubens, were allowed to starve: "at least 200,000" died that way.

Cuba-loving Author Rubens carries his story through the U. S. war with Spain, through the U. S. military government of Cuba, and closes with a rhetorical description of the Cuban flag rising slowly over Morro Castle. As in a well-behaved cinema, nothing is supposed to follow the supposedly happy end.

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