Stuart Chase


Stuart Chase was an American economist, social theorist, and writer. His writings covered topics as diverse as general semantics and physical economy. His thought was shaped by Henry George, by economic philosopher Thorstein Veblen, by Fabian socialism, and by the Communist social and educational experiments being in the Soviet Union around 1930.
Chase spent his early political career supporting "a wide range of reform causes: the single tax, women's suffrage, birth control and socialism." Chase's early books, The Tragedy of Waste and Your Money's Worth, were notable for their criticism of corporate advertising and their advocacy of consumer protection.

Early life

Chase was born in Somersworth, New Hampshire, to public accountant Harvey Stuart Chase and Aaronette Rowe. His family had been living in New England since the 17th century. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1907 to 1908 and graduated from Harvard University in 1910 as a public accountant. After graduating, Chase became part of his father's accounting firm in Boston.
Chase married Margaret Hatfield in 1914 and had two children, Sonia and Robert. He and Margaret were divorced in 1929, and one year later, he married Marian Tyler, a violinist and staff member at The Nation who collaborated with him on several of his books; she survived him by three and a half years.

Career

In 1917, Chase left accounting and took a position with the Food Administration of the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C.. In the commission, Chase conducted investigations on waste and corruption, one of them being the meatpacking industry with Upton Sinclair.
In 1921, Chase joined, along with economic philosopher Veblen, the Technical Alliance, which later became Technocracy Incorporated, part of the Technocracy movement.
Chase also worked with the Labor Bureau, an organization that provided services for labor unions and cooperatives.
In 1927, Chase wrote Your Money's Worth, discussing advertisements that promise but fail to deliver products as advertised to customers who order them.
In 1927, Chase traveled to the Soviet Union with members of the First American Trade Union Delegation and was the co-author of a book that praised Soviet experiments in agricultural and social management.
In 1932, Chase wrote A New Deal, which became identified with the economic programs of American President Franklin Roosevelt, a phrase that he and Fabian socialist Florence Kelley gave to Roosevelt, which he used in his first presidential campaign agenda. He also wrote a cover story in The New Republic, "A New Deal for America," during the week that Roosevelt gave his 1932 presidential acceptance speech promising "a new deal. However, whether Roosevelt speechwriter Samuel Rosenman saw the magazine is not clear.
Chase's 1938 book The Tyranny of Words was an early and influential popularization of Alfred Korzybski's theory of general semantics.
Chase supported United States non-interventionism and was against U.S. entry in World War II, advocating this position in his 1939 book The New Western Front. After the war, Chase became involved in social science. In 1948, he published The Proper Study of Mankind in which he introduced the social sciences to several college campuses.
In a 1952 article, "Nineteen Propositions About Communism," Chase criticized the government of the Soviet Union, stating that its citizens, trade unions and farmers "had no power" despite the claims of Communist supporters. Chase also dismissed the Communist Party USA as "our minuscule menace" whose members consisted of "a high proportion of frustrated neurotics and plain crackpots as well as some high minded-idealists — a tragic group, this last."
Chase also quoted Herbert Philbrick to the effect that "the McCarthyites and demagogues... make the work of the FBI more difficult by confusing the innocent with the guilty."
In the 1960s, Chase lent his support to the Lyndon Johnson administration's Great Society policies.
Chase died in Redding, Connecticut.

Quotations

Chase is famous for the rhetorical question at the end of his book A New Deal, "Why should the Soviets have all the fun remaking a world?" That was a reference to the "socialist experiment" in the Soviet Union.
He is quoted in Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action as having said, "Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat."

Free Enterprise into "X"

On pages 95 and 96 of The Road We Are Traveling, under the heading of "Free Enterprise into 'X'", Chase listed 18 characteristics of political economy that he had observed among Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain between 1913 and 1942. Chase labeled this phenomenon "... something called 'X'". Characteristics include the following:
  1. A strong, centralized government.
  2. An executive arm growing at the expense of the legislative and judicial arms.
  3. The control of banking, credit and security exchanges by the government.
  4. The underwriting of employment by the government, either through armaments or public works.
  5. The underwriting of social security by the government – old-age pensions, mothers' pensions, unemployment insurance, and the like.
  6. The underwriting of food, housing, and medical care, by the government.
  7. The use of deficit spending to finance these underwritings.
  8. The abandonment of gold in favor of managed currencies.
  9. The control of foreign trade by the government.
  10. The control of natural resources.
  11. The control of energy sources.
  12. The control of transportation.
  13. The control of agricultural production.
  14. The control of labor organizations.
  15. The enlistment of young men and women in youth corps devoted to health, discipline, community service and ideologies consistent with those of the authorities.
  16. Heavy taxation, with special emphasis on the estates and incomes of the rich.
  17. Control of industry without ownership.
  18. State control of communications and propaganda.

    Selected bibliography

George Orwell mentioned Chase in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language". While discussing using language to express thought, Orwell mentions the claim held by Chase and others that abstract words are meaningless, and their use of this claim as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. He adds, “One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.”
In 1969 President Richard Nixon cited Chase's work in a message to Congress about consumer protection.