Businessman's Book

To his varied distinctions as an out-of-the-ordinary businessman, Eric Johnston last week added another. The smooth, bright-faced president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published his first book, America Unlimited (Doubleday, Doran; $2.50), with a first printing of 250,000 copies. In it, he expounds briskly and sometimes brilliantly the evangel of free competitive enterprise which he has preached up & down the U.S., South America and Britain.

Frank to concede the "deadly sins" of U.S. business as well as of labor (TIME, March 27, 1944), Author Johnston nonetheless believes that U.S. capitalism is the world's best economic system and is enormously proud of being a successful U.S. businessman. He writes that the "Alger pattern ... is unmistakably" apparent in his own life. His penniless, work-filled boyhood taught him that competition is the soul of every game, that competitive effort involves an immense cooperative effort, that communities and individuals boom together. "I plead guilty of being a Kiwanian," he declares, "sharing all the sins of extrovert good fellowship, self-improvement and community spirit which the so-called intellectuals love to lampoon. ... I see no hypocrisy in concern for the general good coupled with an interest in private advancement. . . ."

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