When Franklin Roosevelt last week told reporters that he would speed aid to Britain by eliminating the silly-fool dollar sign from the transaction, he stamped 1940 as a year in which a U. S. Revolution came out in the open. In that symbolic phrase, and in the year of gathering fears and tensions that had led up to it, the whole eight-year course of the New Deal seemed suddenly to be photographed in lightning. Politicians had steadily taken power from businessmen. And now in A.D. 1940, with the world in the grip of war economy, even dollars had ceased to be as important as something else.
The U. S. businessman never loved dollars as metal or paper, in the grim, sensual way in which Frenchmen loved francs. The U. S. businessman, in the days before the Revolution, was George Babbitt, a booster—a booster because he was a believer. He believed in money because it represented something else: power, as some called it; freedom, as others called it. Power, freedom and money were an indivisible atom. Therefore, dollars mattered.
Hitler and Roosevelt came to power at almost the same time. It was that spring in which all banks were closed in the country where dollars mattered. Few businessmen could read that portent. Most businessmen retained their faith that this depression would pass like others. Not until the Second and Third New Deals did businessmen begin to suspect that the New Deal was splitting the Money-Power atom; that henceforth money would be just money, while Power was going to belong to politics. A.D. 1940 was the year in which that suspicion was confirmed.
This month, when the National Association of Manufacturers gathered for its annual Congress in Manhattan, its outgoing president, Henning W. Prentis Jr., of Armstrong Cork, bespoke the general uncertainty when he asked the Government to define the businessman's new role. A few at that Congress already understood that the best deal they could make with the Revolution was as men of skill and money, not of power. They sensed that their role in it was simply to make money—hard, sterile money, but money to which the world's only remnants of freedom were still attached. The Revolution frowned on challenges to its power. It smiled on men who still wanted to get rich.
In San Francisco Gastrointestinal Specialist Dr. Felix Cunha charted the incidence of stomach ailments against the Dow-Jones average. Result: a rough X, showing that when business goes down, businessmen's stomach troubles go up. Said Business Week: "Logical as that thesis is, though, we'd like to work on the reverse of it—that when businessmen get stomach trouble, business recedes."
Confidence and prosperity are the chicken-&-egg of economics. Does confidence turn the wheels, or do turning wheels churn up confidence? A.D. 1940 settled the second half of this dilemma: they don't necessarily. There never was a year in which Business had less confidence, or in which industry moved faster.