‘Oh, not really,’ I said.
‘Of course so,’ another cut me short. ‘I happen to know in Nigeria the railways, ports, power, mines, and even broadcasting are run by government. And isn’t that the pattern all over Africa and Asia today?’
‘Don’t you think those industries you have mentioned are too vital to leave in private hands?’
‘A real communist fellow,’ someone muttered at the out-skirt of the crowd about me.
‘One thing you don’t know –’ I began.
‘And what’s that?’ an impatient director snatched at my tongue.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘those state industries you speak of were really opened by the British.’
‘Oh the British!’ Several there stamped their feet. ‘Why couldn’t they let the citizens themselves develop their own resources?’
‘What of capital –’
‘And of the know-how.’
‘No, those fellows just love fouling up things so the communists can make a quick take-over.’
There was much more musing among those men of money assembled there that day to prospect for profits, none of which they were prepared to risk on the African market.
‘I know your politicians are corrupt fellows,’ one patted me on the back, ‘but tell your President – you are a journalist, aren’t you? – Well, tell him industry is safest and best in private hands. See us here in the US? That’s what we have gone for all our lives, and today we’d do it all over again.’
I thought of the US Postal Services run by government and I could not agree less with the man. Letters are delivered only once a day and unlike Her Majesty’s mail, that must go on, any local holiday is enough to hold up progress of the US Mail. At that moment too, two lines of Pound came into my mind – and the fleet that went out to Salamis was built by state loan to the builders but I thought better of it and kept them to myself.
The old credo of the right to private property and of the inherent ability and right of man to exploit an existing opportunity for wealth sounds as good as ever in the American ear. It little matters that with the collapse of the frontier the chief articles in the creed have also lost all their foundations. The Vanderbilts and Stanfords have built for themselves and their heirs all the transcontinental railways for which Congress in Washington, DC, granted them sole rights as well as all resources above and beneath the ground ten miles on either side, thus spelling the ruin and rise of many a city and state in the Union. Similarly, and side by side, if in cutthroat competition, the Rockefellers and Andrew Carnegies have tapped all the vast wells and mines even though thousands found in them their common grave. And so did the J. P. Morgans unto their heirs for ever –
Robbing the public for private
individual’s gain …
with their world-wide chain of discount banks binding government and individuals alike fast about their feet. In such circumstances what equal opportunity to wealth and power is there left for the present generation American to exploit in the true spirit of his fathers when all the corporations accounting for a preponderant proportion of the nation’s resources, are long since safe and sound in the hands of a few families and females estimated to be no more than a mere six per cent of the entire people? But this again is a futile query to throw at any American.
Once on a trip from Ford’s Mahwah assembly complex, the largest in the whole world, situated at where New York State stands shoulder to shoulder with the State of New Jersey, I recall asking the Colonel about the ownership of America’s giant corporations like General Motors. ‘Why, we Americans,’ he said promptly, and with obvious pride added for the peace of my mind: ‘My wife and I own a number of shares in General Motors. And so do thousands of Americans.’ Now to be fair to the old man, I remain quite ignorant of how large his holdings are with the Chevrolet people. But it is not unusual to meet a proud American investor who because of the ten or so shares he has bought on a huge corporation claims equal ownership of it with a Ford and the true heirs of a Du Pont. So accommodating is the heaven of property and free private enterprise, everybody within enjoys absolute happiness even though one capacity may be no bigger than a jug’s and another as large as the Atlantic.
Against such a backdrop it becomes doubly fascinating to overhear the debates now going on, in the hollow halls on Capitol Hill, over new vistas of wealth like aeronautics and satellites communication. Who is to own them? Is an industry valued at billions of dollars and developed with taxpayers’ money to be signed away by government to a private monopoly group? It had been done before, when General Ulysses Grant of Civil War fame granted perpetual concessions to the Robber Barons who exploited their mines and railways at public expense and with public bonds. And in this present day and age the same principle has been in full operation since and during the War, with the granting of sole manufacturing rights of nuclear and other heavy military equipment to a closed cartel. This is free private enterprise, indeed not unworthy of that saying by Christ that unto them that have more shall be given, and from them that have not even the little that they have shall be taken away and added to them that multiply their talents abundantly.
It would be interesting to watch how the advocates of state-ownership fare further in the debate, especially now that one of their most outspoken men, Senator Estes Kefauver, has fallen, mortally wounded in action, so to speak. And if the Kennedy Administration, as in many other issues, refused to show its claws, it may well be on account of the simple fact that a strong central government is a red rag to the champion American bull who will charge and pull out all such administrative claws at any sign of their showing. That surely was the cause of racialist state Governors like Ross Barnett and Wallace, of Mississippi and Alabama. But Federal Troops moved in all the same as a worthy band of matadors, and probably the whole world outside South Africa was their aficionado! But resistance to government advance is certain and unbending on other fronts more vital to the American if less celebrated. I quite remember once an advertisement carried in a national newsmagazine. The message? Rally round the banner of private enterprise, it exhorted all true Americans. The Federal Government has made inroads into the power supply business other than with its damned Tennessee Valley project. If you don’t take a stand now and dislodge all those socialist agents, you sure will lose the entire field!
Now, the fun in this hue and cry was that more than eighty per cent of the power supplied in the United States has always been in the control of private hands. It is also significant that it was in this very industry that some of the most notorious anti-trust prosecutions have been made in the United States. Top-ranking executives in the nation’s largest electrical houses were probably at that time still serving sentence in Philadelphia for fixing equipment prices, sharing out the market among themselves, and keeping out all others from contract awards in a tight monopoly vice. As a result and part of this free enterprise frenzy and craze, the American housewife has had to pay for her electrical services (which goodness knows she needs in the factory of her kitchen) at a rate that has risen by more than sixty per cent since the War as against an increase in other consumer fields ten times less than that.
But as de Tocqueville well stated in his testimonial, America is one vast house of chance and contradiction, with a structure unwieldy beyond understanding. And truly as that French noble predicted, the house so divided deeply against itself was a few years after one vast hall of death. Of course the slaughter of brother by brother exhausted itself in five years, but the outcome proved so delirious that the victors abandoned the stand for the defeated who went further and dug themselves in deeper than before. Since then, although the terrible mess was all cleared up, ghosts have haunted its gilded halls and walks. And to this day, as family members from Massachusetts engage themselves in a running row with others from Mississippi over the natural rights guaranteed the individual, black or white, by the American Constitution, birthrights which the school song innocently proclaims are enjoyed from the city of New York to Birmingham, the visitor from abroad, not won over by the conducted tour and the lavish board, may well wonder how long this union of several disparate, self-repellent elements can last. But then many a marriage has survived on some rock of convenience undiscovered to the gossip columnist!
6
The Affluent and Free
I often had to remind myself that Americans come of emigrant peoples, drawn from all sectors of the compass under all kinds of circumstances, pioneer peoples who crashed every barrier to a continent closed to the world until Columbus stumbled upon it, founding fathers who debated the slightest domestic problem in the open town-hall of their settlements surrounded everywhere by wilderness, and who, possessed of no power beyond a mulish insistence upon abstract common rights given all mankind by God, successfully broke the initial yoke thrown upon any overseas peoples by the biggest imperial bully of them all. So ignorant and almost fascist, so stay-at-home like a wall-gecko, and so conformist and scared of any talk of change were most Americans I met or viewed in action and accounts, that I found it difficult connecting them with their original revolutionary stock.
My first shock was at the respectable hands of a Princeton businessman who asked me to lunch at the local Rotary Club. The lady in double-plated jacket behind the reception desk at Nassau Inn threw me a doubtful suspicious look, probably for showing my face in the premises at all, but immediately I said I was the guest of a gentleman whose name I gave her, she sprang out round the counter-bar, switched on a smile that showed me sweetly all the way to my host, who, she said, was already inside the dining hall and waiting with his honourable friends for the visitor from Africa. There I joined them, a very distinguished gathering indeed, except that so many princes and overseers of industry and business were there present, each in his pavilion and stand, that it was folly for a stranger visiting the fair to try telling one tent from another. I accordingly contented myself with remaining by my host, generous (as most Americans are), and a textile magnate. But taking the floor that day was a most inventive representative from the Johnson and Johnson complex, a gentleman, at one time the sole staff of that federal agency examining all new drugs before they make appearance in stores all over the Union. And like the multi-inventor George Washington Carver, for whom he had the greatest respect and no colour label, he was seeking patents for several wares, ranging from boots and tyre soles to surgical gut and possible covers for sausages and hotdogs edible as well as durable. And all of these came from one basic source and raw material, namely, rubber.
‘Better apply to be the new Johnson man in your country,’ the gentleman across the table laughed in my face.
‘Not a bad idea,’ I laughed back.
‘Belong to the Rotary Club in your country?’ my host asked.
‘Unfortunately, not,’ I said ‘for that’s real class.’
‘Oh yes,’ everybody laughed. ‘Really the best passport you can get anywhere – from Afghanistan to Venezuela.’ A member who had just returned from India shifted in his seat. ‘Actually brought in that flag up there only the other day.’ We all looked up at the flag-board on the wall.
‘No, I guess your country isn’t up among those yet,’ my host read my thoughts.
‘By the way, what part of Africa is Nigeria?’ he added.
‘Oh, on the West Coast,’ I offered.
‘Now, Ghana is your capital city, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Ghana and Nigeria are two separate states entirely.’
‘No?’ he fixed me with his fork. ‘Now that really is news. And is Nigeria north of the other then? Excuse my asking but these new countries in Africa, they are creations of the British and the French, aren’t they?’
‘Quite like the thirteen Colonies, aren’t they?’ I wanted to say, but then the gentleman from Johnson and Johnson was already up on his feet and fingering his notes all carefully laid out on the table, and to him we all turned our attention and with great profit too it proved to be. Later, my host, still meaning no offence, ate up my sweet. ‘Or did you want some?’ he regarded me gently. I tried a stale joke. ‘No, I feel sweet as I am!’
‘Now, about Nigeria again, if I may ask,’ he shook out his serviette and wiped his mouth in no great hurry, ‘how large a place is it?’
