From the Easy Chair

Work, Job Experiences

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 25-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AM71

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AM71, Work, Job Experiences from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 177, September 13, 1988.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss work, specifically job experiences that we have had, but work generally.

Otto will have an advantage here because he has held a variety of jobs whereas most of my life I have been in the ministry. And there is much there that I cannot discuss. However, by way of introduction I would like to call attention to something that I feel indicates the difference between some years ago, 65 or so years ago when I started school and schools today. At that time before we wrote compositions, one of the things we were expected to do by way of expression as to get up and say in a few sentences what we wanted to do when we grew up, what kind of work we were interested in.

Much later, well, a couple of years later, we wrote essays on the subject. I wonder if any students do that now. But schooling was very much work oriented at the time.

Looking back, the thing that I remember vividly was that so many of the boys in the class were interested in doing what their fathers were doing. Now perhaps alter on they shifted into something else, but at the beginning the influence of the family was such that the boys in the class wanted to imitate their fathers.

I am citing this because it tells us a couple of things, how family oriented children were then, that they wanted to pattern themselves after their parents and how work oriented they were so that no boy of six had any trouble getting up and saying what he wanted to do when he grew up. I would suspect that very few could answer that question now.

Otto, any reactions?

[Scott] Well, yes. Such fresh observation and one that hadn't occurred to me. I think you are right about that. I remember writing a composition, as we called it in those days. They gave us a series of titles and you could choose whichever title you would like to write about. And I remember writing one on Thomas Edison and the title of the composition was “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” And it wasn’t even necessary for the teacher to tell us who the wizard was. We all knew that it was Mr. Edison and we know the names of Harvey Firestone and many other leading industrialists, inventors, generals, heroes of the United States. I remember when Lindbergh went across the Atlantic that the following week or the following day after he landed in Paris it was a general discussion between the teacher and the class on the meaning of this particular achievement and so forth, his modesty. He said, “We made it.” and so forth.

Now I don’t believe we have the same kind of heroes. I have gone into the libraries and I see on the shelves of the libraries rock stars, actors, actresses, athletes, a great deal of black people who have been successful, women who have been successful. We have always had successful women. We had Amelia Earhart at the practically the same time as Lindbergh. We had very outstanding actors and actresses. We had authors. We had people who wrote books and so forth, but it wasn’t emphasized as such. And yet there was a sort of a feeling of a healthy society which the children had at that time which I don’t think they have today.

But the whole question of work, the whole question, as you say, my experience has been unique. I recall when we lived in the Copa Cabana hotel in Rio there were some men working on the hill not too far away and they had little hammers that looked like gavels from a distance and chisels. And they were chiseling brick out of stone. And they looked very much like our brick, about the same size, tap, tap, tap and you would hear this tapping going on all day long. And my father took me out on the balcony and said, “Now, you think they work hard?”

I said, “Yes, of course. They work very hard.”

He said, “How much money do you think they make?”

I said, “I have no idea.”

And he told me. He made it his business to find out. It was some ridiculously low sum. So then he said, “Hard work alone isn’t sufficient, is it?” He said, “You have to apply yourself with some intelligence.” And he was not the sort of man who was apt to lecture. He would drop a thing like that on you once in a while and then wouldn’t pay any attention to you for months. He never had conversations with me until I grew up. He just... he was not what you would call a playmate. He wasn’t one of those. He wasn’t a soft, warm type.

But I remember his tips and I remember after I left home when I was, what, 16 or so. I was in Baltimore and I was down at the farmer’s market in Baltimore walking around and one of the men asked me if I wanted some work and I said, “Sure.” So it was loading or unloading. It was unloading and stacking hundred pound sacks of potatoes and onions as the trucks came in. And I worked all day and at the end of the day we were finished I went over to get my money and he pulled out one of these merchant’s purses, a big long purse filled with coin and he dug around in there and he got some coins and he finally gave me something like 35 or 40 cents. And I kicked him and punched him and got into quite a bit of trouble for it.

I finally got out of the trouble on that one, but the thing that I learned after that was: Don’t go to work until you find out how much money you are going to get.

[Rushdoony] You know, you brought back memories to me when you mentioned writing about wizard of Menlo Park. And we had that kind of assignment to write about one of the important men in current science or business.

[Scott] That is right

[Rushdoony] Harvey Firestone.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Henry Ford.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] Edison and others.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] So that we knew what people were accomplishing in our own time. And...

[Scott] Well, business was a part of our culture.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And I recall going to see a parade in which Edison, Firestone and Ford were all present. I think school was let out that day so we could go and I know that the next school day we were asked to give our reactions to having seen these men and we were expected to have an awareness of the world going on around us and an appreciation of what these men were accomplishing.

[Scott] Well, it was also we were expected to already know. They didn’t take us on tours. We... we weren’t taken to any factories when I was a boy in school... in grammar school.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] We weren’t given any of those kind of instructional things, but we were expected to already know. And I knew that Edison had only gone to the fourth grade and that he had trouble hearing because one of... a conductor hit him in the head.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Hit him in the ear and broke one of his eardrums when he was selling candy and cigars on the train. He worked his way up.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well there was still Horatio Alger paperbacks, you know, in the momma, poppa confectionary stores of New York City when I was a boy and I used to buy one for 10 cents each. They were used books. I autographed Horatio Alger and Oliver Optic and... all of those.

I ate them up by the ton. And they were all of poor boys who had come to the attention of some well meaning businessman by stopping a runaway horse or doing some deed of bravery or gallantry. Good was rewarded and doors opened. And the real message was a highly moral message that the world is rational, that effort pays. And there was another element and I think I was fortunate in the fact that although the Scotts, my branch of the Scott family was international, that my mother’s family were working class. And the working class, they didn’t know they were poor. They owned their home. It was a modest home. They had Sunday going to church clothes. They had food o the table. They really didn’t lack of anything and they had no envy. There was never a discussion of what other people had.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I think that is an extremely important point, Otto, because I believe that note of envy was introduced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his campaign and then as president in his fireside talks and speeches...

[Scott] The economic royalist.

[Rushdoony] ...economic royalists were attacked.

[Scott] Malefactors of great wealth.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And because Roosevelt was regarded in almost messianic terms, everything he said was taken seriously and it created immediately a hatred, a division that was very, very deep.

[Scott] It is interesting, because Mr. Roosevelt was not a Marxist. He was a snob. He was very class conscious personally and a snob is a low level attitude. It is a back of the stairs attitude. I mean it comes, of course, from the English senior nobilitate, nobility in the private schools. I mean, without nobility, not a member of the peerage. And people who are not a member of the peerage have more class consciousness than the people who are, because, of course, there is something there that they don’t have.

Roosevelt was very class conscious. So was Mrs. Roosevelt who played lady bountiful from one end of this country to the other. I will never forget that cartoon in The New Yorker which showed these two coal minors and one of them was looking in...

[Rushdoony] I remember that.

[Scott] ... to the darkness and said, “My, it is Mrs. Roosevelt.” And...

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is... that was a classic cartoon. Well, I saw the implications of what Roosevelt was doing very clearly when I graduated from high school, because that summer the summer of 1934, before I entered college, I worked in San Francisco at the Crystal Palace Market. It was in its day the largest indoor market in the world. In its size it would easily encompass more ground than super... malls do now. It was an enormous market.

[Scott] I remember...

[Rushdoony] Selling foods.

[Scott] It was very impressive. I remember.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I worked there at one of the stands, one of the concessioners selling rice, coconuts, all kinds of grains, dried foods, dried fruits, pine nuts in the bulk. In fact, we would get the shredded coconut in huge barrels. And then take it...

[Scott] Is that all imported?

[Rushdoony] I guess so.

[Scott] {?} must have come from someplace else.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And you would fill up the bins with it.

[Scott] Of course, in those days a seaport was different than the regular city.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is true. Well, I worked 59 hours a week for 13 dollars and I was one of the better paid employees around in those days. There were four of us working there. The other young man and girl I don’t recall at all except that they were there. The third was a girl whose first name was Bebe and I enjoyed her quite a bit because she was intelligent, she was lively and she was also interested in writing. In fact, she had sold a few short, short stories to Liberty and publicans like that under another name. Interestingly, she was very interested and respectful of my Christian position and background. She herself was Jewish without any faith and she would ask me some intelligent questions.

Well, the thing that marked that experience there at the Crystal Palace Market was that that was the summer of the general strike, 1934. And what you had was the bewildered population that still had the old training and education now being told that they should hate and envy and resent everyone else and any number of radical groups with all kinds of names with Socialist in them and the Communists as well, were going though the market every day and through every place of employment in downtown San Francisco passing out mimeographed sheets that were calling for revolution.

At that time the longshoreman’s strike was on and every day there were dead bodies floating in the bay. I don’t know whether there is any record of how many disappeared at that time.

[Scott] No. There is no record.

[Rushdoony] They were afraid to talk about it or to admit it.

The boss there at our particular concession told us to be agreeable to these agitators who came through, because he said, “It won’t do you any good to argue with them and I don’t want you floating in the bay. These are dangerous people.”

They were calling for a general strike and they truly believed that with that general strike the whole population of the United States would arise against the...

[Scott] ...exploiters.

[Rushdoony] ...exploiters. And the revolution would begin in San Francisco. It was quite an experience to go through. For years as I moved from place to place I kept those old mimeographed sheets, but they were on such poor paper and disintegrating I finally threw them away.

[Scott] Well, it might interest you to know that years later I became a pretty good friend of Harry Bridges.

[Rushdoony] Oh.

[Scott] And knew him and ... and Watson and several other members of the ILB... the longshore union quite well.

The... Bridges was an interesting man. He is, I guess. He is still alive, I believe. He must be quite elderly. Is he still alive?

[Rushdoony] I don’t think so, but I could be wrong.

[Scott] I... I am not sure about it. But in ordinary conversation a very mild, easy going... well, not... not particularly easy going, but very mild and quiet. He would grow in reaction, in argument and the more people he had arguing against him, the larger he would appear. Very unusual reaction. He was almost entirely fearless. He was the chosen standard bearer for that general strike.

Well, we have to go back. And if we are going to talk about labor and management—and I think you can’t evade that if you are going to talk about work—is that the history of labor is that the history of labor in the United States from the post Civil War period onward is a history of violence.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Violence came in with the early refugees from the war... the Revolution of 1848.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... in Germany. And they introduced all these socialist ideas. Mr. Roosevelt, I think, was one of the victims of those ideas, because he accepted many of them. He accepted the idea that the working man was, per se, innocent, an innocent savage, so to speak and the decadent aristocracies were treating them badly. But from the earliest unions on, from the hay market days on, the unions have had goons and strong arm squads.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I was in the seaman’s union, as you know, and I took part in the big strike when Harry Truman was president at the... right after World War II, in fact, closing period of World War II. And we had two strike committees. We had an official strike committee which could be arrested and put in jail if the union got... violated a legal injunction or something and then there was a secrete strike committee which actually ran the strike which he called the seeing eye committee and I was on that committee.

The... early on both the employers and the unions would use strong arm men and I remember in the very late 30s when the head of the... the printing trades unions was a senator, Senator Berry from, I believe, Tennessee. I am not sure. And they had very tough men and there have been lots of murders in the United States over labor. The general strike was the only general strike we ever had in a city. So it was a spectacular thing. But what you are saying about the bodies floating in the bay, could be repeated from one end of this country to the other.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

[Scott] I remember when... when Moe Annenberg set up the racing wire he was, you know, one of the biggest gangsters we have ever had and his son later became ambassador to England and is now entertaining President Reagan and what not and all that blood stained money that the Annebergs have. He just sold TV Guide for I don’t know how many millions of dollars.

There were over 400 men killed by Annenberg’s agents in order to establish a monopoly on the racing wire. And yet with all the agitation, with all the effort from the 1850s and 70s and 80s and the bombs in 1900, 1905, and 1910 and the IWW and the Harry Bridges and the Communist party and all the rest of it, they were never able to get the average American to hate somebody else for succeeding.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is very true. The atmosphere changed dramatically after Roosevelt took over. It gained a respectability , the hatred of one’s betters.

[Scott] It became acceptable intellectually, because it was no longer a sin.

[Rushdoony] Yes. It also changed the moral climate. Now when I was 10 years old in 1926 I worked a summer as an office boy in the General Motors building.

[Scott] How did they pay? Do you remember?

[Rushdoony] I don't remember what I was paid. I was paid reasonably well then, better than during the Depression. And I regularly walked to the bank with a lot of money.

[Scott] Oh, sure, perfectly safe.

[Rushdoony] Perfectly safe.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] There was never any feeling that there might be a threat or a problem.

[Scott] Oh, no.

[Rushdoony] I would go there and come back, no problem.

[Scott] Women and children were safe.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Women and children were protected.

Well, the third year of the general strike was the year I left home, 1934. And I didn’t get to San Francisco, although I wanted to, because it sounded interesting, but the police were turning people back. There were , by the way, posters on the trees around the railroad jungles of strike breakers. Wanted, they would say, scab number so and so. And they would give his name and all this. I think I got about as far as Portland. I am not sure. And then the police said, “You would be better off to go back the other way.”

So I went back and stopped in Montana and spent a summer at Whitefish, Montana. It was an interesting summer, because I found out that a railroad tie which is, as you know, creosote soaked, will burn exactly over night and if you set two of them on fire and sleep in the middle it was perfect. And in the morning I pulled in my lines in the lake and I would always have a couple of fish and I would fry fish for breakfast. I had enough to cook a fish.

And I had a couple of part time jobs and I stayed there until the weather turned cold and I went down to Bismarck, North Dakota where I learned how to play poker and got a job with the federal emergency relief administration and began to find out something about office work and all that sort of thing.

I spent a lot of time in those years in the libraries. And I lived in two worlds. I lived in an intellectual world of books and better minds, you might say, in distant places. And then a real world of rather as I looked back on it, elemental sort of prosaic living. I got to know and to meet a great many poor American families and I found them to be unfailingly kind and generous. I conceived a great admiration for the people of this country at that point.

And... but I never did go into the all American idea of continued education or continued schooling, let me say, continued schooling with a hope of getting a job with a big company and all the security involved. I made a deliberate choice for insecurity from the beginning. I thought it was more exciting, it was more interesting and since I knew I was going to be a writer, I would learn more.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the things that marked the transition from the 20s, which had their problems...

[Scott] Oh, indeed.

[Rushdoony] ...and were far from an ideal period, was the fact that while in the 20s the superficial and ugly culture affected people at the top, by the 40s it began to go to the bottom.

[Scott] That is a good point. That is a very good point.

[Rushdoony] In the 30s, the average man was still in the tradition of a Christian faith and culture.

[Scott] That is true.

[Rushdoony] But... but by the 40s with a combination of politics and education, everyone was beginning to be infected by the world of envy, world of class hostility and resentment, hatred.

[Scott] Well, don’t forget that, well, as you say, the 20s were an ugly course period. The 20s were very hard for working people. They were very good for people who were in speculated industries as somewhat similar to today. If they were in the stock market, if they were in real estate, if they were in luxury goods, if they were in leisure, entertainment, bootlegging, but if they were farmers, if they were in a steel mill and... and in basic industry, things were very difficult. There was a lot of open prejudice.

The attitude of the United States in the 20s is what drove my father out of the country. He could not stand the open references to everyone else’s race or religion or ethnicity. He couldn’t put up with it and he said that the men that he had to deal with in business in Wall Street drank too much, talked to much and had too many prejudices. He found it easier and better for him to go back to Caracas and he went back and he... he went back in the early 30s and thereafter only came to this country as a visitor.

And I kept saying, “Well,” I said, “You know, you have only known New York and Washington, the two worst cities we have got at that time.”

But the 40s were the period of institutionalization. Don’t forget the 40s where when the government began to school everybody.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And teach everybody and much as in England the socialists were the teachers.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes. And war is always a revolution, because it is an opportunity for centralization of power and the creation of a totally different culture.

[Scott] Well war is by its essence amoral.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the New Deal, of course, used the war to create a radically different country and the difference between, say, the people in 1939 and 1949 is quite dramatic.

[Scott] As dramatic as the difference between World Wars... before World War I and later.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I have a cousin who is only five years younger, but he might as well be of another generation. Those who matured before World War II were different than those who matured later.

[Rushdoony] One of the things, Otto, that I feel also occurred was that there was a changed attitude towards work. Men prided themselves on being good workers, conscientious workers in the 20s and in the 30s. But by the latter part of the 30s all the New Deal bureaus and agencies began to create another outlook. You remember the WPA workers and the joke about their biggest effort was leaning on their shovel. It was an overstatement, but there was a real element of truth because minimal work for the maximum pay began to be a demand. And I saw that when, oh, 36, 37, somewhere along there I worked for a while at the Market News bureau in San Francisco in the old ferry building. And what the Market News did it was a federal agency, was to collect every day the records of the amount of fruit, vegetables, foodstuff of any kind that came into San Francisco by ship or rail or truck so that they were there at the points of delivery keeping a record for federal purpose sand also the prices as they were set, say, at four or five in the morning before the stuff went out to the markets.

And then this was broadcast for the benefit of farmers, because farmers were then basic to the economy of California. They are still number one. But they were more numerous then.

Well I was in the boss’ office where the figures came next to his secretary and I worked at an adding machine with these figures all day long. And then one of the dozen or more men in the outer office would take them to the radio station at 11 o'clock for delivery at the 12 o'clock farm report.

On one occasion everyone was busy at various tasks and the boss handed me the stuff and told me to go. And I was given cab fare to go there, but I looked at the address and I realized it was within walking distance, about five, six blocks. I went there, gave them the market report, signed for it, filling out a little form and then walked back. I walked in about 15, 18 minutes after I left and the head of the Market News bureau turned on my angrily and demanded to know why I had not left yet, that I should have left at 11 promptly.

And I said, “But I have gone and come,” before I realized what the situation was, because everyone had been going and taking the whole hour and then the noon break before returning so they had two hours off. And...

[Scott] And they had forgotten to tell you.

[Rushdoony] And they had forgotten to tell me and they were all in shock, because I had...

[Scott] You had ruined it.

[Rushdoony] I ruined it for them. But now that was not an attitude you would have found 10 years or six or seven years before. That was something created by the New Deal and by government agencies. This was a federal agency so it was especially apparent there. But goofing off on the job became now...

[Scott] Well, you could, if it was a federal agency. You couldn’t if it was a commercial organization, because there were five guys for every job.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And they were sharp. The competition was quick and you could be fired at the drop of a hat. On the other hand, there were no résumés. You could walk across the street and apply to a fellow’s competitor and if he said, “Do you know anything about the work? Do you know how to do it and so forth?” And you could be hired. There was no dossier that followed you from job to job. He didn't say, “How far have you gone in school?”

Don’t forget. The 30s was a time when schooling was held against you. If you had a graduate degree or even a bachelorate you couldn’t get an entry level job because they assumed that you were too good to keep it and you would be looking over their shoulder for something better every minute. So you were over qualified.

[Rushdoony] And employers then were geared to assessing men and doing it very, very ably.

[Scott] And very quickly.

[Rushdoony] And they were not afraid to fire at the drop of a hat.

[Scott] Oh.

[Rushdoony] Something that employers dread now.

[Scott] Well, I... if you were fired you were paid on the spot. And if you quit you had to wait till regular pay day. Well, I have been both fired and quit on various occasions, more than I can remember. And on one job I had working in, I have forgotten now. I was in the office, but I don’t know what I was doing. I decided to leave and then I thought, well, I would... it would be better if he fires me, because then he will have to pay me off. And there was a clock on the wall and he had a wrist watch and he had a watch in his vest. And when you came in he would look at the watch in his vest, his wrist watch and the clock on the wall. And he was great for punctuality which was pretty common in those days. Well, I came in at 9:20 and he rushed out of his office and went through his routine and said, “What happened?”

I said, “What do you mean, what happened?”

He said, “Well, you are 20 minutes late.”

I said, “What do you want? A note from my mother?”

He said, “You are fired.”

And it wasn’t until he was writing out the check that he looked at me and he said, “You did that deliberately.”

Life was not as grim. It didn’t have all the luxuries and conveniences, but it wasn’t as grim. There was more laughter. There was more joy. There was more independence than we have today.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The boss could fire you. And you could walk in another place and they didn’t ask you why you left. They would just say, “Can you do the work?”

I do recall, though, that one of my fates in almost all the jobs I had was to wind up as a ... as a... as an administrator, as a manager. And I never particularly enjoyed being a manager, because it is like being poppa, like being father, as you know. Everybody becomes your kid and you have to listen to his troubles and take care of him and sympathize and so forth. And I... I even developed a technique for breaking in as a manager. And I really probably shouldn’t say so aloud, but my first task was to establish authority. And to establish authority I would fire somebody and I would do it fairly quickly. And then it would be like having a bloody head on the corner of the desk. Everyone in that department or that group from then on would come to attention. And never until I did that. And I... I had no compunction about it because there was always somebody there that was fireable.

[Rushdoony] Well, that is no longer true.

[Scott] I know. I did that at Ashton Oil. I fired the advertising director and they supported me in the dismissal. But they told me not to do it again because it was against their policy. There was supposed to be a review and there was supposed to be a probationary period and I don’t know what all.

[Rushdoony] In more than one area mandatory retirement has gone in simply as a way of getting rid of people they are afraid to fire. I know that at one university the top man in the department had to go because to get rid of a man who was becoming senile and the chairman was unwilling to say to the man, “You cannot function well anymore. We are going to have to drop you.” They instituted a policy which eliminated both me. Their top scholar.

[Scott] Isn’t that terrible?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I had... I had Christian Herald, you remember was being edited by Polling.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Polling’s nephew, really. And he said he had a problem that there was one of the editors on the publication and I had no hesitation saying this as he didn’t ask me to keep it a secret. One of the editors was an alcoholic. What should I do? He said, “He has a wife and several children, a very nice family, but,” he says, “unreliable, irresponsible, alcoholic.”

I said, “Is he the only one?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “The other editors are sober and do their work?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “And you give them the same money you give him? Do you give him less money? Do you give him the same money?”

He said, “Well, the same money.”

Well, I said, “Why are you... why are you doing that? Why are you rewarding the unworthy?”

But he said, “He has a nice family.”

But I said, “It is not your responsibility to take care of his family. It is his. And he is never going to pick it up as long as you are taking care of his family for him.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He said, “Well, I didn't expect that sort of response from you, Otto.” He said, “I sort of thought you were a more sympathetic fellow.”

I said, “Well, I really am thinking in terms of helping the man and not supporting him in his vice.”

And I have had to confront similar problems as a manager. We have a fellow here who has been with the company for seven years. I remember in one situation and he had a family, too. And they ... the other men said, “Well, we really don't think you ought to let him go.”

I said, “Well, let’s put it this way. He is holding up progress in his department. If I can find somebody that can do a better job then we could probably hire two or three more people in that area within in a year. If I keep him in the job, that department will continue to be mediocre. Now we are not doing a lot of other people a favor by keeping him and he is in the wrong job for his capacity. He doesn't belong in this job. You have held him on for sentimental reasons. But we really can’t afford this.”

Well, they said, “See if... if you can do it in such... do it decently.”

I said, “Oh, I will try my best.”

And what I did finally is that I called another group. I called a ... I have forgotten. I think it was a magazine that was running for some business group and I said, “I have got an experienced editor. But,” I said, “He is blocked where he is. He cannot be promoted. I am not even sure that he belongs on this kind of a book. And yours seems to me he might do better at.”

They said, “Well, send him over.”

I said, “No, I won’t do that. He doesn't know I want to get rid of him.” I said, “You call him and invite him in. And if ... if you like him, well, then, of course, you will both be better off.”

So they called him in and they liked him and they hired him. So then he came in and he told me off. And I really think God should give me a gold star for putting up with that and not saying anything. But he was gone and it worked out very well. It worked out, but you it... it is no favor to keep an incompetent man in a job.

[Rushdoony] No. And I have often wondered in those days when people were very readily dropped and there was usually blunt, plain speaking... now your episode took placed after the war.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] I am talking about before the war.

[Scott] Yes. Well, what do I... the... the watch thing...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...was before the war.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And before the war there were so many people eager for work that if a person didn’t perform he was expendable.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] He was easily replaced.

[Scott] He was holding back everybody.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And everybody knew it.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now they knew, every worker knew there were consequences if they didn’t perform.

[Scott] Sure.

[Rushdoony] They lived in a world of consequences.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] Debt was a all time low, personal debt in the 30s.

[Scott] Well, look a the foreclosures.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Look at the penalty.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And Roosevelt tried heavily to inflate the economy, but nobody would borrow, because they had been burned. They knew there were consequences.

Now after 1950 something new came into the United States far in excess of any of the borrowing that marked the 20s. The long term debt and over extension into debt.

[Scott] Well, the 30 year mortgage.

[Rushdoony] Yes, the 30 year mortgage.

[Scott] That was the greatest thing. The... the... combination... it wasn’t simply the 30 year mortgage. It was a 30 year mortgage and the IRS write off.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, at the same time there was the belief that somebody was going to bail you out.

[Scott] Or should.

[Rushdoony] Or should, yes. And parents very often did. The attitude unfortunately after the war of the Depression year youth was, well I had it rough. I am going to spare my children. So in the 50s and 60s they were spoiling them. And the net result was the debt binge we have had ever since. One of the most common pastoral problems is the young couple who would get so head over heels in debt that if they paid all the payments on any given month...

[Scott] They wouldn’t have enough to eat.

[Rushdoony] They would have nothing left to eat on.

And I have talked to people who are financial consultants like Victor {?} and others as well and this is a common experience, both with ministers and counselors, that young couples do not see a day of reckoning, because they are so used to being bailed out by their parents.

[Scott] Well, there are some other things and I agree with what you say. The institutionalization, which I thought of earlier, all these people were picked up by the millions. I think we had something like 60 million people in uniform and that is not counting all the subsidiary forces that were involved in such a defense effort. We had cost plus programs in shipyards, steel mills and so forth. Later on they did something terrible. They renegotiated the contracts. Now it was true that during the war there was a lot of waste, but the waste was at the expense of time. You were told that they had to get things out immediately. So these people spared no expense in order to turn it out.

Well, then later at the end of the war in came young accountants, too young to have been involved during the period who reviewed all these contracts and who said this was not a competitive price. You will have to give us back what they called excess profits. And in the process, they destroyed the sanctity of contracting.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because if you cannot rely upon a contract you make with your government, then you cannot rely upon a contract that you make with anybody in that... in that country. And that was the beginning of that sort of nonsense which is now rampant. Contracts are broken all over.

And the other part was the learning in groups and in masses. And the biggest question, the biggest point of such schooling and you can call it schooling whether it is in an army or a navy or wherever, is that you learn obedience. And these are fundamentally obedience classes in which you learn that if you obey the teacher and you obey the rules, you get a good mark and if you disobey, if you dissent or if you differ, you do not get a good mark. So out came the group mentality of the modern American, which took place the... the... the ... I understand the same thing took place in Britain.

In Britain the Socialists taught the troops and they taught the troops to despise Churchill and turn toward the Labor party.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

[Scott] They turned the clock around in Great Britain. And, of course we... we have selected a lot of things from Britain. It was done here. That is a smaller country, but it is with less people. The things that happened in Britain are more discernible than they are in a massive country like ours. But I noticed at the ... after the war, now I talked to the publishers association of California because I wanted to settle out here and the fellow said, “Otto,” he said, “For what we have to pay a man like you, we can get two kids straight from schools of journalism and we don’t have to worry about what they will write.” And I was through.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I was through at the end of the war. And I, of course, went into other contributory parallel lines of activity, publicity and public relations and advertising and so forth. But more and more I began to run into the young men who matured after the war or during the war.

No to mature during the war is to mature during a time of restlessness when money was abundant because we were far from the scene of battle. Most Americans forget that. We were like the Swedes. There was no fighting here. There was only money and work here.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So the United... the Americans got a view of World War II which was... they liked it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It was at a distance. It wasn’t dangerous to them. And afterwards these young men looked at me as though I was Buffalo Bill. They really and truly... I was old fashioned by my late 20s because the whole society had changed its views.

[Rushdoony] You spoke of the abundance of money here as in Sweden. I worked as a student during the summers and Saturdays for an antique jeweler. He got most of his stock from Italy, Florentine jewelry in particular was his specialty.

With the war, that supply was cut off. And he had to shut down his shop. I ran into him somewhat later toward the end of the war and he was operating a shop that was selling very expensive, very fancy nightgowns and pajamas to the war worker women. And he said, “It ... it... it troubles me,” he said, “These are extremely expensive. They are luxury items. And here are all the Rosies, the riveters buying them with no one to wear them for, just spending their money because they have got so much of it and they cannot keep it.” So he said, “They will come in and buy more than they need for years to come, because they are eager to spend the money. They feel rich and they want luxury items.”

[Scott] Isn't that interesting? I think probably it is an appropriate time to talk about my mother who was quite patriotic and she had put 80,000 dollars into American war bonds in early 1942.

[Rushdoony] And that was a fortune then.

[Scott] It was a lot of money then. And she put her name and my brother’s name on half of them and her name and my name on the other half and never told us a thing, never mentioned it. And when she died in, I think it was 19... what is this 88? She died, I think, in 1982 at the age of 83. The value of those 80,000 dollars in war bonds had shriveled to the point where when the lawyer called me up he said, “Your... you have a very modest legacy from your mother you and your brother, very modest.” She never dreamed that the... her government, her beloved country that her government would steal from her.

[Rushdoony] Well, you see, in 1940 those cities and places where a teacher could make from 150 to 180 dollars a month.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Would have as many as five and 6000 applicants for one position.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] Because that was considered very good pay.

[Scott] And it was a stable job.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And a ... a class job, so to speak. I... I always thought that the police of New York City in the late 30s, the 30s, were the sharpest men that I personally knew in terms of worldly wisdom, what they called street smarts which I... a phrase I don’t particularly like, worldly wisdom, I prefer. There was great competition for those jobs and they paid well and there was a certain amount of {?} involved, but it wasn’t immoral. It wasn’t from prostitution or thievery or drugs or liquor or anything of that sort. What would happ... they would get favors from businessmen whose proprietors of stores and so forth who couldn’t afford to buy a special security job and wanted to make sure that Flanagan would keep an eye out for them. And Flanagan would. And... and this is almost, you might say, a part of humanity.

Now I notice in the same level that the policemen are not paid commensurately, the salaries of the police have not kept up with inflation. So therefore the caliber of competition of the police job is not as high as it was. It is not as keen as it was. They have more regulations and restrictions than they did and they have less common sense. I keep reading where the put eight bullets into one man. Now it is not necessary to riddle an individual in order to stop him. That is a cowardly thing to do. One bullet is enough to stop anybody. One well placed bullet will stop an elephant unless you are afraid. And then you spray him with bullets. And I see various actions by various police forces which I don't think are very admirable or very sensible.

In the ... the days we are talking about there was an awful lot of more independence, a lot more independent judgment. This was a country that was still in the control of the people. I think this what it comes down to.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes. And that has been lost progressively. And it is because the people have given more and more of their own responsibility to the federal government and to the state governments.

[Scott] Well, they sold their souls.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our time is almost over, Otto. Is there a closing statement that you would like to make?

[Scott] Well, yes. I... I think the pendulum swings. The pendulum never stops. This country was so different in the 30s than the 20s that it could have been two different societies. So different in the 40s than the 30s that you could say the same. So different today from the 60s, for instance, not that different, but different. There are sweeps that take place in the American society and I don’t think that the way we see things today is the way that we will see them in a decade from now.

[Rushdoony] Very good. Now before we close there is something I would like to say. These Easy Chairs we are trying to produce for you with the best content we are capable of at the lowest possible price. As a result there are some things we could do that we don’t do. For example, we only number the Easy Chairs, because to put down a title on them would cost more. Therefore, we suggest that when you get an Easy Chair you mark it with the title.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.