Spengler's Explanation for
the Decline of Western Civilization

H.V. Johannesson

[Reprinted from the Philadelphia Ledger, 1932]

We have nothing to indicate that we have learned anything between the time of Coxey's march and Cox's. Both stupidly marched to our political fakery to plead for help from hold-up men. One wonders how our forefathers managed to hunt and fish and till the soil when there were no supermen at Washington to give them doles or loans. I guess it somehow connects up with the punishment a professor inflicted upon his audience for an hour or more trying to explain what Spengler had written about decline of Western civilization. The professor had gone to Europe for a bulky volume to get what a now famous Philadelphian fifty years before had written in one chapter, not only much better than Spengler but more complete, in Progress and Poverty.

Much space is being allotted to Dr. C. C. Furnas, of the Sheffield Scientific School, for his exposition on how little time we need to spend at work to make a living. But like Spengler, he has no remedy for the paradoxical fact that all our inventions have but slightly relieved labor and taken away none of the universal anxiety and dread of poverty.

Apparently our economic doctors never look about them. They never saw that if the "owner" of land can take as rent the difference between what the poorest and the best land yields, labor on land of high productivity is no better off than he who labors on the poorest. In our centers of civilization landlords receive as high as $5,000 a year rent per front foot annually. They discount productive power. But hunger marches and Spenglers and Furnases are oblivious to facts.