Plain Talk

Columnist Walter Lippmann forsook foreign affairs and domestic politics for a moment last week to deliver a pep talk to the U.S. businessman. And he said a mouthful.

The American businessman, wrote Mr. Lippmann, holds his -- and the world's --fate in his hands because, of all the world's great powers, the U.S. alone has "no governing class which has a social position and political power superior to that of the business community." For that reason preoccupation with the current economies of other nations will be far less instructive to him than the study of a significant thought from the past : the psychoanalysis of the divergent fortunes of British and French aristocracies made some 80 years ago by "the incomparable de Tocqueville."-

According to Lippmann, de Tocqueville concluded that the British aristocracy survived because its members "accepted heavy burdens in order that they might be allowed to continue to govern," while the French aristocracy perished because they preferred to cling "to their privileges and immunities to console themselves for having lost to the king the power to govern." U.S. business can perish or survive according to how it chooses between the same essential alternatives today. But the great danger is that U.S. businessmen will unwittingly suffer the fate of the nobility of France -- unless they stop "brooding upon their grievances and their troubles and their lost prerogatives and their diminishing immunities" and concentrate upon the commanding position they really hold in world affairs.

It was just such dangerous preoccupation with its own troubles that turned the National Association of Manufacturers' annual meeting into a gloomy near-flop last fortnight (TIME, Dec. 14). But last week N.A.M.'s new President Frederick Coolidge Crawford echoed the constructive half of Mr. Lippmann's thesis. Up to then tall, lean Frederick Crawford had been noted mainly for his spectacular rise from hot-dog-stand owner at Harvard to mile-a-minute president of Cleveland's Thompson Products, Inc. His interest in political economy has been confined to loathing the New Deal.

Mr. Crawford once said no businessman can make a speech because the field "has been abandoned to crackpots, reformers, politicians, nonproductive drones who live on our backs and sway public opinion by silver-tongued fireside bunk." But last week in Manhattan Businessman Crawford ate his earlier words in his maiden speech as N.A.M. president. Said he:

"One thing we can do . . . is to abandon the idea that the public has no confidence in our point of view. . . . This, as I see it, is the biggest challenge before management today: will we take the same initiative in public affairs we always have taken in the management of our individual busi nesses? It will mean an end to the easy practice of saying nothing except to criticize the mistakes of others. It will mean that we will have to take the responsibility of making constructive recommendations of our own, and this includes accepting the blame if these recommendations go wrong. . . . If we want the public to follow industrial leadership, we must provide it."

* Alexis Charles Henri Clerel de Tocqueville, French statesman and political writer, 1805-59.

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