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dark history of the Russian experiment, the seeming durability ofthe old capitalist villainy and the rise of the New Era, contrary toall the best prophecies, shook profoundly the faith of many of thePark Avenue, Greenwich Village, and academic savants who hadflirted with the Red dream. Thorstein Veblen, an erratic grumbler,who had a flair for discovering to his own great surprise commonplacetruisms that practical men had always known and clothingthem in the language of philosophy, exercised a powerful influenceover the minds of the youth of the early twenties with his theoriesabout the dictatorship not of the proletariat but of the engineers,along with this device of planning. Veblen added, as a sort of afterthought,the economists to the engineers, and his disciples latertook in the whole tribe of professors. Most of his followers wereeither socialists or the material from which socialists were made.And so they expunged from the philosophy the hateful words of"dictatorship" and "Soviet" which Veblen had used so frankly.They were for "democracy" and, of course, for the dear people and,of course, they were against the businessman as the prime villain ofthe capitalist system. But they were for capitalism, and they set upas the saviors and planners of a nobler and better form of capitalismwhich would be organized in the interest of their beloved masses,but would be managed for them by a legion of trained public servants—actuallyan elite of the professors.When Mr. Roosevelt came into power it is entirely probable thathe never heard of Veblen and certainly knew nothing of his theories.But it fell out that the economist-member of the brain trust wasone of Veblen's most devoted disciples. He proceeded to indoctrinatethe candidate and the brain trust with ideas for a capitalistsystem cast in the mold of Veblenian fascism. This was Mr. RexfordG. Tugwell. Accordingly we find Mr. Tugwell saying, about thetime he became Mr. Roosevelt's chief economic adviser, that "Americamight have had some such organization as the German cartelsystem if we had not set out so determinedly forty years ago to enforcecompetition." 1 He called attention to the fact that factorymanagers had learned how to link their machines up in series, so thatthe product moved from one process to another without interrup-¾peech before American Economic Association, December 1931.195