H. G. WELLS ON AMERICA

Greymouth Evening Star, 5 August 1935, Page 9

H. G. WELLS ON AMERICA

DISAPPOINTED WITH‘NEW .DEAL.

“The New America: The iNew World,” by H. GA Wells, is .reviewed by • r. V. Machell,' in the “Daily Telegraph” as •follows:— A A : j ; Disappointment is % tjie. keynote or Mr H. G. Wells’s' report ’on the New Deal-in America as he finds it in 1935. • Gigantic he ’ believes, are being missed , anti stoprgap »policies .are • pulling, in contrary directions. Above all, he complains of the total absence of exhaustive thought displayed both by the.. ‘.‘Raucous Voices”—as he calls Father Qoughlin and Huey Long—and by the “Inexplicit Men.”—the bankers and industrialists who show no sign of constructive criticism. '■ ■’. When Mr Wells was in America in 1934 lie became filled with enthusiasm for what he hoped would result from the New DeaK The convergence of strong minds at the White Housejjromised to produce a clarified American Idea. Life was to be replanned in the one country where such a vast experiment might most readily succeed. Mankind has failed to keep pace with technological developments and, as Mr Wells sees it, is in the position cf “a .monkey alone in a moving motor car, terrified and imperilled by the disproportion of the opportunity.” In the United States, it then- appeared, the tremendous readjustment might be made between the old way of living and tho new. The President seemed to share Mr Wells’s conviction that if in this expanding universe man does not lead an expanding life he is inevitably doomed. Early this year Mr Wells returned to tho United States to see if Washington was “getting on with the job.” He found that the majority of Americans did not even know what the job was. .Mr Roosevelt called his account of his first year in office “On Our Way”; but Mr Wells found that, even among Government administrators, few had any idea where the way was leading. “The New America” is one of the shortest reports on the Roosevelt regime which has appeared. But Mr Wells’s power of clear thinking makes it as important as it is' disquieting. Tho New Deal and all the other socialisms, communisms, and plans for the corporate state are. in Ills words, “the sketchiest, most incomplete anticipations of the real planning that is demanded ol us.” America is undergoing a social revolution, changing its economic' and administrative organisation upon the most drastic scale. But “unless these changes are drawn together into a greater unity than they now possess unless a coherent vision of the New America and the new world that is latent in the knowledge and invention of to-day can be given to the tniseducated and perplexed masses waiting lor leadership throughout the world, these changes will end in downfall and disaster.” Tho future importance of Huey Long—who reminded Mr Wells of “tt Winston Churchill who has never been at Harrow”—will, together with much else of greater moment,’depend on whether the men who dominated | the old America play,a creative part, i in the events of tho next few months, i “If they will conic out of their se- ; cretive individualism . . . then it is : from tho level of Huey Long, who thinks loudly and audibly, even if be thinks wrong, that the reconstruction I of America must proceed.” i In his great hopes of what the New Deal would achieve, Mr Wells overlooked one thing; the American tendency to value the liberty of the in- ‘ dividual higher (han the’public good. ! Now that the Administration, follow- . ing the recent Supreme Court judgi ment, can no longer enforce by law 1 tiie various Codes, an even greater ! spirit of co-operation will be neccsI sary in America before Mr Wells’s I dream cun be realised. It is a dream ; of man’s surplus energy being iwjrrd ; into “a vast, extension <>i public cdu--1 vat ion, great schools, great clinics aud a multitude of giant enterprises iu research exploration and social adventure.”