Published in Collier’s, January 28th, 1938

I SPENT October and November in America and saw Indian summer at its best, colours such as no other part of the world can boast, russet, glowing reds, keen bright yellows, soft green yellows, grey-blue, black-green, and skies of a serene magnificence. And the white American homes, grey-tiled, nestled brightly in that setting. In Philadelphia it rained, but it always rains in Philadelphia, and New York forgot itself for a day or so and blew and rained. Kansas City looked amazingly fine and handsome and I admired the parklands Henry Ford is laying out by Dearborn and the fine new pile of the Yale library, Gothic with a touch of skyscraper, and 2. great success at that. From the humming plane that took me from Detroit to Boston I looked out and saw Niagara foaming in the sunshine. I spent an instructive day at Flushing while the piledrivers hammered down hundred-foot trees into the mud, like a carpet-layer hammering tacks, preparing for the buildings that are to make New York’s World Fair of 1939 the most wonderful ever. Everywhere colour, warmth, movement, vitality-and people talking about the new depression and possible war.

The depression that has struck America this autumn has been the most surprising thing in the world. It has been like the unaccountable failure of an engine. The wheels that had been spinning so busily slowed down until now the spokes are visible, and nobody on earth seems to know when they will pick up again or even whether they will pick up again. I came over to America once in the season of hope and hardship when President Franklin Roosevelt was newly in the White House. I thought then that he and Stalin were the most eventful persons in the world. They are both in their successes, such as they are, and in their human shortcomings, cardinal men. The old private-property money system was showing signs of age and an imminent breakdown. A new order was indicated as plainly in America as Russia. The New Deal, I assumed, was to be a real effective reconstruction of economic relationships and the Brain Trust was to get together and tell us how. I was particularly keen at that time to see and sample what I could of the Brain Trust, that improvised council of informed and constructive men which had to modernise and re-equip a staggering modern community. I found it a trifle incoherent. I went afterwards to Russia to talk to Gorky and Stalin about the absolute necessity for free discussion if a social order is to be effectively reconstituted. But Gorky I found grown old, fame-bitten and under the spell of Stalin, and Stalin, whom I liked, has never breathed free air in his life and did not know what it meant. When I revisited the President in 1935 things were asway and rather confusing. Now they are clearer. The New Deal was a magnificent promise, and it evoked a mighty volume of hope. Now that hope has been dissipated. Mass-hope is the most wonder-working gift that can come into the hands of a popular leader. The mass-hope of world peace at the end of the Great War, the mass-hope of the Russian revolution and the mass-hope of the New Deal were great winds of opportunity. But these great winds of opportunity do not wait for ships to be built or seamen to . learn navigation. They pass; they are not to be recalled. As I flew now over sunlit America and noted the traffics of life ebbing again below, and realised that that great capital of hope was nearly spent, I found the riddle of how people will behave, get past or stand up to, what is coming to them this year, a problem very difficult to contemplate in a sunlit manner. More and more of them will be short of food and shelter this winter — with no end in sight and nothing of the trustfulness that staved of disaster, perhaps only temporarily, in 1934.

Like hundreds of thousands of people I have had some sleepless nights over that riddle. It has been more and more vivid in my mind, since I wrote Anticipation: in 1900, that our world cannot struggle out of its present confusions and insufficiencies without a vigorous re-organisation of its knowledge, thought and will. Its universities, schools, books, newspapers, discussions and so on seem absurdly inadequate for the task of informing and holding together the mind of our modern world community. Something better has to be built up.

Nothing can be improvised now in time to save us from some extremely disagreeable experiences. The Flood is coming anyhow, and the alternative to despair is to build an ark. My other name is Noah, but I am like someone who plans an ark while the rain is actually beginning. This time I have been giving a lecture in a number of great cities about various possible educational expansions. I have been trying to interest influential people in schemes for knowledge organisation and I have been talking to teachers, professors, educationists — in considerable profusion.

I have never lectured before in America and only my real fanaticism about education made me attempt it at all. I liked it much more and it tired me much less, than I had anticipated, and my audiences abounded in pleasant young people who listened intelligently and asked intelligent questions. There were drawbacks — a processional hand-shaking, for example, and a disposition to lure the lecturing visitor by promises of tea and a quiet time, into large unsuspected assemblies where he is pressed to give an uncovenanted address. He is pushed through a door suddenly and there an ambushed audience is unmasked. It is not generally known in Europe — possibly I have been carried away by some misunderstanding — that in every considerable American city large gatherings of mature, prosperous, well-dressed women are in permanent session. They sit in wait, it seems, for any passing notoriety and having caught one insist on “a few words.” This year they are all wearing black hats. These hats stick in my mind. Ultimately of the most varied shapes, the original theme seems to have been cylindrical, so that the general effect of an assembly of smart American womankind in 1937 is that of a dump of roughly treated black tin cans. The crazy irrelevance of this headgear on embattled middle-aged womanhood, is as essential a part of my memories of America this year, as the general disposition to discuss the depression and suggest nothing about it, and the still unstanched criticism of the President.

I talked to the President over a lunch tray and I told him how variously he was disapproved of and how incapable the opposition seemed to be of presenting a plausible alternative to him. It was our third meeting. I wrote of him some years ago as floating a little above the level of ordinary life. I find him floating more than ever. He seems to me to belong to the type of Lord Balfour, Lord Grey of Fallodon and Justice Holmes, great independent political figures, personally charming, Olympians detached from most of the urgencies of life, dealing in a large leisurely fashion with human stresses. The President is a skilled politician, as Holmes was a great lawyer, and Grey a bird watcher and fly-fisherman, but the quality their statesmanship has in common is its dignified amatcurishness. “Tell me,” Balfour used to say, treating the other fellow as a professional whose business it was to know.

At the first convulsive intimations of failure in the economic machinery of America when Franklin Roosevelt came out as the saviour of his country, “Tell me” was in effect what he said and the Brain Trust was the confused response. I recalled his difficulties to him now, because I wanted to see how far he was a disappointed man and what sort of philosophy he had got out of it. The constitution had lain in wait for him, as every written constitution lies in wait for innovators. But his major insufficiency had been the quality of the aid and direction that the American universities and schools had given him. They hadn’t told him, and instead of specialists they had yielded him oddities. The Brain Trust had proved very incalculable men. Men whom he had promoted had, he remarked, a trick of coming out against him. I pressed my obsession that America, like all the rest of the world, is in trouble because of its inadequate intellectual organisation. Men and women have been educated as competitive individuals and not as social collaborators and even at that the level of information has been low.

He agreed and began talking of certain experiments that had been made in the cultural development of Poughkeepsie county. It seemed to me an interesting and amiable exploitation of leisure, about as adequate to the urgencies of our contemporary situation, as polishing a brass button would be in a naval battle. I did not think him oblivious to the reality that America has to reconstruct its social life and cannot do so without a modernisation of education from top to bottom, but I got a very clear impression that he did not feel in the least responsible. He was not deeply interested in preparing for the future. That indifference is a common quality of the Olympian type.

The Olympian type assumes a competent civil service, but it cannot be troubled to make one. It takes the world as it finds it, and so the worst thing that can be charged against the President’s administration is the continuation of the spoils system in the public services, for which I am told his close association with A. Farley is responsible. You cannot have safe administrators who do not feel safe.

We glanced at the possibility of a successor, but he did not seem to have any particular successor or type of successor in mind. We agreed that the danger of a world-wide war crisis would rise towards a maximum between 1939 and 1940 and he thought that by that time there should be some one younger, quicker, and better equipped to meet the urgencies of possible warfare without delay, in the White House. But he spoke of that rather as his own personal problem than Americas I left this autumnal president, feeling extremely autumnal mysel￡ and a day or so after I saw a play in New York, I’d Rather Be Right, in which I found a good-humoured confirmation of my own impression. It was a play about the American future, personified by a young couple who want to marry; the president, sympathetic but inadequate, was the principal character and the cabinet, the supreme court and so forth were presented under their own names. It bore marks of divergent suggestions, cuttings and rearrangements, but the genius and geniality of George M. Cohan made a delightful and sympathetic figure of the chief. The show is saturated with derisive affection. On my previous visits to America I had remarked that President Roosevelt was believed in enormously or hated intensely. The mood has c............