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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Was Louis Bromfield the first 'Crunchy Con'??,
This review is from: A New Pattern for a Tired World (Hardcover)
Louis Bromfield (1896 - 1956) was an Ohio farmer, Pullitzer prize winning author, film writer, a member of New York's "Cafe Society" as well as both a conservationist and a conservative critic of the Cold War. Bromfield's family roots were on the land, he was a descendant of Daniel Boone, his father had a deep interest in restoring run down farms and Louis studied in agricultural college before turning to writing. Many of his books and movies (for example. "The Rains Came") had environmental themes. Louis eventually grew weary of the Hollywood life and returned to Ohio, and his family roots, to embrace his passion for what today we would call "sustainable agriculture". He spent years restoring and living self sufficiently off his "Malabar Farm", a model farm demonstrating soil consevation and restoration, where he hosted the marriage of his friend, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Conservative Bromfield regularly sparred on political matters with FDR supporter Bogart. Historian Joseph Stromberg calls him a "Northern Agrarian" and a modern Jeffersonian.
Louis, who was decorated by the French for his service in World War 1, and a one time resident of France, was pro-intervention when World War 2 loomed. But by the early fifties he had moved from an interventionist position back towards a more 'isolationist' viewpoint, at a time when most of the conservative traffic (for example Arthur Vandenburg) was heading the other way. " A New Pattern for a Tired World" book deals with his thinking on the great issues of war and peace and was written in the early 1950s in the early days of the Eisenhower Administration. Bromfield is not a specialist writer on foreign affairs but at least illustrates quite clearly that not all American conservatives were cold warriors. His critique of US foreign policy was of course not strictly isolationist, few if any 'true isolationists' actually existed. Instead of the Atlanticist focus on NATO, Europe and the Marshall Plan, or the related 'Internationalist' focus on the UN and general foreign aid, Bromfield urged the US to look back towards the Monroe Doctrine and update it along the line's of FDR's "Good Neighbor" policy, developing close and mutually beneficial economic cooperation with the nations of the Western hemisphere, particularly Canada and Brazil. Bromfield saw the "Good Neighbor" policy as a successful policy left to die on the vine, once war, Atlanticist and Internationalist concerns came to dominate. He believed this new Monroe doctrine would better serve America's and liberal democracy's interests in the long run than the actual strategy implemented by Truman and Acheson. America's cold war strategy was he believed reactionary and counter-productive. In the guise of fighting communism world wide, America became in effect the military and financial underwriter of what was left of European imperialism. This "european" rather than "american" strategy put the US off side with the ultimately unstoppable nationalist movements of the Third World. This was really a tremendous 'own goal' in the struggle with communism, allowing Soviet and Chinese agents to appear as the banner carriers of nationalism. To compound matters American encirclement imposed an artificial unity on the communist bloc that itself was something of a ramshackle empire of diverse nationalities and interests. On net the Atlanticist / Internationalist vision undermined America's and liberal democracy's long term interests. Even had Soviet satellites come to dominate the Eurasian land mass, the very forces of emerging nationalism America's cold warriors sought to tame as proxy enemies for the Soviets, would emerge as a local counterforce, resistance and reaction to communist domination. His alternative vision focused primarily on the cooperative economic development of Canada, the US and Brazil. These three could provide the 'free world' with a western hemisphere bastion. He wanted the same vision ultimated extended to the rest of the Americas. His focus was on economic cooperation not military alliance. He wanted US trade policies to promote the free movement of workers, capital and goods between the western hemisphere nations, with government policy aimed at promoting "American style" decentralised and competitive capitalism versus the top down "European Style" class and cartel dominated capitalism that government - to -government foreign aid promotes. He was not a strict continentalist in the sense of aiming for a pan-american trade bloc, he was too much of a 'free trader' for that. He believed the ultimate path to peace and stability for the world was for open trading communities to develop to link the smaller nations with the fewest natural endowments into cooperative relations with the several resource rich powers (eg America, Brazil, Russia, China) . This pattern would lead to a more balanced and stable world structure. 20th century Britain, for example, over-dependent on industrial exports and agrarian imports was an example of an unstable and unsustainable development, underlying structural instabilities of this type helped lead to the two, and nearly three great European wars. He argued that the solution to the economic and military problems of postwar West Europe (including Britain) was in the development of a european federation. He opposed economic aid and US military deployment (essentially aid in kind) as merely slowing the needed federal reforms. Both Washington's cold war strategies and New York's United Nations failed to deal with these fundamentals. He was quite scathing on the UN, he called the widespread view that the UN fosters or is responsible for world peace an example of the modern success of the "Big Lie" technique. Peace has both it's origins and failures elsewhere. At the same time he also criticises the unprecedented rise of military leaders to positions of power within the US republic (notably the appointment of General Marshall as Secretary of Defense) and the power and 'unreformability' of the military and naval establishment. He says apart from the Kaiser's Germany it is hard to find a comparable example of military dominance in a western nation. In a sense Bromfield's geopolitical vision is an outgrowth of his Jeffersonian agrarianism, which itself has almost a near spiritual dimension. Getting back to the land in his forties helped rebalance and reward his personal life. He believed that the social and moral health of the nation was also tied to the land. "The cure for all these racial differences and ills is at base equal economic opportunity, education-better diet, and better soil upon which that diet is grown, -better ethics, and finally the annihilation of ideas about the superiority of one race over another." Even the race issue had it's roots in the soil. "As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence go with them." The racial problems of the South were aggravated by the nutritional, cultural and economic ramifications of soil destruction. Obtaining a rural / industrial balance was important for the economic and political health of the nation and it was important for healthy economic and political relations between nations. The layout and exposition of "A New Pattern for a Tired World" (1954) is a bit irritating, the footnote practice is unconventional and the lead in quotations, including a whole chapter of quotes from other sources, seems to me to be diversion without effect. Broomfield could perhaps make his points more succinctly. But the ground covered is extensive and his overall vision is worthwhile and illuminating. Bromfield's writing in do not bear the marks of a professional writer in the foreign policy realm, however his insights are unique and, from the perspective of a reader 50 years after the words were written, they do seem to have stood the test of time quite well. The collapse of the Berlin Wall has shown his view of the Soviet's ramshackle empire as largely correct. Yugoslav communist heretic Milovan Djilas came to argue, thirty years after Bromfield, that NATO was counter-productive providing a threat justification for Moscow's domination of East Europe, preventing the mellowing of the old Warsaw Pact states into more open Yugoslavias. Bromfield's interpretation of the US Cold War dubious campaigns in the Third World, especially within thethe first 25 years of the Cold War, stands better than the Domino Theory or any of the myriad of official justifications generated by successive generations of 'National Security intellectuals' from McNamara's Whizz Kids to today's neocons. His comments on Indo-China have been vindicated by history. And it is possible , from the perspective of current concerns about 'the axis of evil', that his critique of America's long running tilt against India, in favour of the inherently unstable 'balkan' state of Pakistan, may also be vindicated, along with his views on the 1950s absurdity of making Korea America's front line. Bromfield's views on regional economic cooperation as a basis for stable peace seems to have had practical merit and, is at least, a project under way in many parts of the globe today, if in a format perhaps more statist than Bromfield would have recommended. The development of the EU and it's role in fostering peace and prosperity in Europe can be seen as another predictive win for Bromfield. To use his reasoning the great US aid, military umbrella and arms flow in the immediate postwar period counter-productively delayed it's emergence. Louis Bromfield's vision of a modernised Jeffersonianism has in some ways been rediscovered by 'environmentally oriented' thinkers including E.F.Schumacher and the new wave of communitarian, localist and environmentally oriented "Crunchy Cons", (a horrible label) of whom he is perhaps the unacknowledged pioneer. A bit like Daniel Boone.
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