Review of the Book

A Journal of These Days
by Albert Jay Nock

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, May-June, 1934]

Written in diary form this is a gossipy, querulous, complaining volume. The author has a bagfull of animosities, disagreements and dislikes. Even the song of the whipporwill irritates him. With curious wrong-headedness, or out of sheer perversity he sneers at the temporary ineffectualness of Woodrow Wilson's idealism while professing a liking for Clemenceau. Out of like perversity he has a good word for Frederick the Great. One would look for a word of sympathy for President Wilson's dream even if Clemenceau's frank scoundrelism compels his admiration. Such admiration need not have blinded him to the great vision of Woodrow Wilson which he strove to make a reality.

But that is Nock. Nothing really pleases him. "American women do not attract me as a rule," he says. Dickens' Christmas stories seem hollow to him. He speaks of the greatest biography since Boswell -- Harry George's Life of his father as a book of which "the best that can be said of it is that it is competent." Though we are living in a most interesting period of the world's history amid a swirl of rushing events at the end of which great things impend, Mr. Nock says he would have chosen to be born in Paris in 1805 and depart in 1880, and he speaks of this as the most interesting period in the world's history." Why?

We must be very hesitant in questioning Mr. Nock too closely for he tells on page 29 that he was "right nine times out of ten." For fear this might leave too great a hiatus he hastens to add, "oftener than that."

Mr. Nock is a Henry George man but he is not eager to apply the remedy. Familiar as we are with the eccentricities of many who profess a belief in our principles and yet who are in deadly fear of them this does not surprise us greatly. He says of the Single Tax that "the people would not know what to do with it if they got it," and with this shallow sophistry dismisses it. That institutions make men seems not to have occurred to him.

Mr. Nock gives us the idea that he accepts the wild rumor that McKinley's assassination was procurred because McKinley was about to break on the protective tariff policy. Mr. Nock who does not believe anything is singularly credulous here.

He says of Henry George's speeches: "How flat they fall on a modern audience." Just the contrary is true. Yet he calls him "one of the half dozen minds of the 19th century."

"George's biography," he says," makes it clear that he knew singularly little about human beings and the working of their minds. Nevertheless, Mr. Nock hastens to reassure us that something might be done with the fundamentals of his doctrine if the right people took it in hand." We find that phrase, "the right people," subtly intriguing.

We hasten to record our conviction that Albert Jay Nock is of no use to us. Speaking again of Henry George he says, "What a great man he was and how well he managed to get himself misjudged and forgotten." The gospel of futility which Mr. Nock preaches in various forms throughout this volume is partly to be traced to the fact that he is not in touch with the movement. He is in complete ignorance of what is being done. The philosophy he preaches is the very negation of any real conviction on the question or of any influence he may be capable of wielding. He can be of no help to us in advancing the cause. He would do us a great service if he refrained from mentioning it. We say this because it is rumored that he has in contemplation the writing of a life of Henry George.

It must not be understood that the present reviewer condemns this book in its entirety. Indeed there is much that is valuable in it to those who will skim through it. There are many delicious touches of which the following is an example from page 191, where speaking of a work by Cardinal Polignac he says:

"I used to own a fine copy, but old Prof. Peters of the University of Virginia, made off with it thirty years ago, and refused to give it back as fine a piece of broad-daylight, open-air stealing as anyone ever saw. He died a year or so afterwards, and I never recovered the book. May the devil bless him."

And this is even better:

"Today I learned ex-President Hibben of Princeton is dead. He may now be where he can talk over things with his cousin Paxton Hibben, but I have my doubts especially if he sees him coming. I think the first question Paxton would ask him is whether he climbed over the pearly gates or burrowed under them."

There are some wise words on the policies of the Roosevelt administration and its acts. And there is an enthusiastic mention of Prof. George Raymond Geiger's Philosophy of Henry George:

"The book on Henry George that I have been asking for these many years is at last published by MacMillan."

But he spoils it by adding,

"The truth is that no one takes any interest in George's philosophy or can ..."

We venture to submit to our readers the question whether that has been their experience. No one can convince others of a truth unless he has confidence in it himself. He cannot find out whether others are receptive to any degree unless he himself carries to them his own conviction of the truth he is trying to impart.