Fervent Sermon

A TIME FOR GREATNESS--Herbert Agar--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Herbert Agar is not afraid to deliver a sermon. A Time for Greatness is a 300-page editorial on democracy that has the fervor and some of the moral reach of the Old Testament prophets. Two quotations set the framework of Agar's thinking:

> Lincoln's: "The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history."

> Goethe's: "That which the fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it."

Young Man's Return. In the '30s, Herbert Sebastian Agar, poet, playwright, columnist and editor, returned from London to the U.S. disgusted with the aftermath of World War I, feeling that there was little in Europe worth fighting for. So he concentrated on U.S. domestic problems. In 1934 he won the Pulitzer prize for history with The People's Choice, a study of U.S. Presidents. Other books followed, but with the approach of World War II Agar began to feel that the U.S. had an important stake in world affairs.

Three months ago the Louisville Courier-Journal (of which he was editor) and Manhattan's Freedom House (of which he was a founder) granted Agar a leave of absence. He went into active service as a lieutenant commander, leaving behind him his fourth book on U.S. polity, A Time for Greatness, expounding his new philosophy.

The Wrath of God. Agar practices what he has often told the U.S. press: "The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear." Like an early Father of the Church, Agar believes that Hitler and the other great malefactors of mankind are sent by Providence to punish people who have betrayed their spiritual heritage. The standard-bearers of democratic civilization failed to live up to their own standards. If they want to survive, they must practice what they preach.

This moral approach distinguishes A Time for Greatness from the current run of "think" books. A self-styled "creative conservative," Agar preaches no new U.S. revolution, but a new adherence to the social and political principles of the Founding Fathers (U.S.), which he considers in accord with the principles of all Western civilization. "Civilization means rules and promises which are kept. ... It rests upon power to discriminate in the name of moral values."

Convinced that America's cardinal mistake has been to consider this civilization as a by-product of economic progress, Agar believes that merely economic arrangements will not prevent future wars, in short that peace cannot be bought.

Explosive Idea. Agar argues that the "explosive idea" of America is equality--equality of opportunity, equality in access to civilization, equality in protection against the abuse of political and economic power. But neither the U.S. nor the rest of the world has ever completely achieved this equality. In the U.S., the status of the Negro and the poverty of the South constitute the worst violations of historic U.S. principles. In the rest of the world, racial discrimination and the poverty of backward countries indict the weakness of the white man's works.

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.

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