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PARTISAN REVIEW
can speak in the same work of the economic causes of crises, but also of
the decay of western Europe and the economic disasters of the United
States as "natural functions of the overgrown urbanism and cosmopolitan-
ism of these times." He cannot explain why security should decline as
productive power increases; "the disorganization of personal life" is not
the cause, as he thinks, but only an effect.
His own agrarian solution involves a similar indifference to economic
facts. The interdependence of agriculture and industry, of production
and the market, is nowhere analyzed and the obvious practical objections
remain unanswered. He does not ask: what will be the effect of such a
return to the soil and the self-sufficiency he advocates on the millions of
farmers (with their tenants and laborers) who depend on cash crops and
already find their market dwindling? or the effect of the lower income of
the semi-industrial workers on the same agricultural market? He recom-
mends a revival of household industry with modern machines as an
essential part of the new agrarianism. But how can the farmer who grows
crops only for himself afford this elaborate plant for producing his own
household goods?
Characteristically enough, Brownell approves the trend toward indus-
trial decentralization, not seeing that it coincides with an even greater
concentration of ownership and a greater poverty of the masses. He
innocently looks forward to a broader distribution of productive property
as one of the results of this trend; but in the name of a mysterious con-
cept of balance he would preserve· centralized private control of some
industries and a decentralized private ownership of others. Although the
self-sufficiency of the farms in his ideal America is to rest upon the use
of machines, he deplores the drift of the farm youth to the cities, which
is due precisely to the mechanizing of agriculture.
His whole approach is based on the pathetic polarities of stability and
movement, order and restlessness, the land and the city, formulated by
the folk-loving, but anti-democratic, romantic reaction at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. He has inherited its stock antitheses of security
and insecurity, the whole and the fragment, the organic and the in-
organic; and added like his predecessors other categories appropriate to
the politics and science of the moment. There·are indeed personal nuances,
but in the muddled form of the whole, with its eclectic hyphenation of
doctrines, they are as insignificant as the lyrical delicacies of the more
learned Nazis. Like the religious and feudal reactionaries of the last
century and their fascist successors, Brownell wants a "balanced" and an
"integral" society. But balance, he admits, is not good in all fields.
In
population, for example, a homogeneous racial and national stock is
preferable to a "balance of stocks." Nevertheless, he finds "an integrated
life" only in the South. And as he goes on to specify the ideals of his
"natural" agrarian culture, he begins to resemble the fascists to a hair.
He attacks the declining birth-rate and the increasing longevity. The old
are uncreative and useless; big families, especially big rural families, with
plenty of young men, are needed to effect the balance and the integration.
