Arts and Letters

I earn the privilege of speaking of Stuart Chase this evening from a less than demanding, less than welcome, qualification. Even in this far from adolescent convocation there are many who must think of Stuart Chase as belonging to an earlier generation. My distinction is to be one of the few who also so belong. When he died late last year in Redding, Connecticut, Stuart Chase was ninety-seven years old. He had continued writing—cogent and contentious writing—into his eighties. But it was a full fifty and more years earlier that his name, in this case truly said, became a household word. In the days of the New Deal, a phrase he coined for history, there could have been few fully literate Americans who did not know of Chase and not all that many who had not read his work. Not after Thorstein Veblen, one of Stuart Chase's heroes, had there been anyone who wrote so effectively, so trenchantly in attack on comfortable, self-regarding privilege and the comforting economic and social thought that it inspired.

Stuart Chase had a public career in the Federal Trade Commission and was for long on call by Washington. But for all present purposes he was a writer. His books came at the rate of one a year, and their titles—The Proper Study of Mankind, The Tyrant of Words, The Economy of Abundance, along with A New Deal just mentioned—entered the language of their day. They ranged over a wide area of social thought; Stuart Chase was relentless in pursuit of both information and ideas, but there was a common bond; all without exception were in service of a wider human betterment.

In his earliest writing Stuart Chase was concerned with economics, how the true potential of the American economy could be realized and for the benefit of all participants. This especially was his central concern during the years of the Great Depression. Before that he had looked at the position of the consumer in, as he saw it, an era of increasingly mendacious manufacturing and merchandising techniques. His attention later turned to semantics, how words and rhetoric can be used to disguise meaning, defeat understanding, divert people from their most compelling personal interest. In recent times, he expressed his own particular involvement in foreign and military policy and affairs. An unabashed pacifist in his last years, he devoted much attention to arms control, a civil attitude in international relations, including those with the Soviet Union, a strong and strongly justified concern for the military power in our time and its escape from any meaningful civilian control.

I did not encounter Stuart Chase personally with great frequency—a skiing vacation together in Canada many years ago is perhaps unduly prominent in my memory. It was on arms control and the militarization of the modern state that in these last years I had the most rewarding communication with him.

It is, I venture, for these last concerns that Stuart Chase might wish to be remembered. In fact, he will be best remembered as the parent of what has come to be called the consumer movement, the durable consequence of his most famous title, Your Money's Worth, written with F. J. Schlink. From the interest so aroused came Consumers Union and, in more distant descent, Ralph Nader, his diverse raiders and the modern attention for product safety and quality and approximate truth in advertising. I have not, myself, been a devoted supporter of all of this effort; I am not deeply concerned with the comparative virtues of cosmetics, garden fertilizer, or even VCRs. The modern consumer is in some measure subject to flim-flam because the objects of his or her purchase are too unimportant to justify tedious thought.

Nonetheless, few writers in our time can lay claim to a larger legacy. And what Stuart Chase did was greater in his day than now. Then, for a poorer population, the social cost of product mendacity was heavier than it is now in the high noon of what is called the consumer society; then, indeed, it was great enough to arouse critics. Your Money's Worth was published in 1927. It addressed firmly, as I have said, the techniques of consumer bamboozlement: "Have you any evidence except blind hope that the package of insecticide under your arm will actually rid a house of flies? Is this cake of soap going to give you a school girl complexion?... What do you know about the ultimate effect on cells and tissues of that fat reducer?" These even by present standards were sensitive times. Anyone who asked such questions must surely have a deeper, more sinister purpose. A year later, in 1928, one Charles E. Carpenter in a book called Dollars and Sense came forward with the riposte: "Your Money's Worth," he wrote, "is basically communistic propaganda whether or not it was so intended…. We know that it is the policy of the Third Internationale to teach its doctrines and carry its propaganda surreptitiously in America."

We may agree: Stuart Chase in his day was a suitably dangerous man. With all else he would surely want us so to remember him this evening.