From Study Windows

In Chicago last week gathered some 2,000 economists, sociologists, statisticians and political scientists to attend meetings of a dozen learned societies, tell each other and the nation how the New Deal looks from their study windows. In rapid-fire order the following theoreticians made the following points:

Ohio State's Dean Walter James Shepard, president of the American Political Science Association: "The ideology of the New Deal is illogical, inconsistent and turbid. Its program is a mass of undigested and contradictory experiments. It veers first to the right, then to the left. It embodies in its personnel men of the most divergent views. ... If there is any leadership in the New Deal it is the leadership of mounting one's horse and dashing off in every direction at once."

Columbia's Frederick Cecil Mills, president of the American Statistical Association : "The ship of the New Deal is not manned exclusively by Galahads. . . . Under fair skies this might be tolerated. It is a form of social suicide today."

Research Economist Lewis L. Lorwin of Brookings Institution: "In relation to labor the NRA may be said to represent a bundle of missed opportunities, halfway compromises and unpremeditated achievements."

Columbia's James Waterhouse Angell, economist son of Yale's President James Rowland Angell: "The rising public debt and governmental inflation, which the process of pump-priming almost inevitably carries with it, are precisely the factors best calculated to destroy private confidence and to discourage private business recovery."

From the vantage of his 72 years. University of Wisconsin's Emeritus Economist John Rogers Commons dismissed the whole pother with: "It makes no difference how the New Deal is taught, because most of the New Deal legislation will be declared unconstitutional in the next few months anyway."

Walter Falrleigh Dodd of Yale and Chicago dismissed Economist Commons with: "It is a clear problem not of the constitutionality of the New Deal laws but of the ... capacity of the people to pay."

Two University of Chicago professors lifted their eyes from current strife for a glimpse at the future. "Planning in a democracy," declared venerable Political Scientist Charles Edward Merriam, "is a co-operative enterprise, requiring widespread sympathy and support, beyond party and beyond region. Business can block it; labor, agriculture, the middle class, can block it. But the danger then is that we drift away from planning, not into a blissful heaven of politics and economics, to live forever with golden harps, but to a point where force mounts the throne and writes a plan in blood and steel."

Argued long-chinned William Fielding Ogburn, famed sociologist whose recent booklet on You and Machines so alarmed CCC Director Robert Fechner by its "pessimism" that he barred it from his camps: "Industry apparently needs the aid of government. . . . Some kind of super-organization is needed. . . . This super-organization should be a creation of the State rather than a private industry. Government has been slower to grow than industry. One retarding influence is the difficulty in building up an efficient administrative service. ... A large deliberative assembly is not the happiest device for a crisis; nor is our system of representation based on areas."

No academician, rotund Press Agent Edward L. Bernays appeared before an American Political Science Association meeting to present the most bizarre idea of the week. He wanted a Secretary of Public Relations in the President's Cabinet.

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