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the reality that as pure ideals, they were basically inapplicable in a healthy society. Still, as a people divided by a common language, we can be as stupid as any and will no doubt continue to wrap ourselves in the illusions of misleading labels.
The importance of a word in maintaining an illusion was made vividly clear in 1902, when President Roosevelt was trying to appoint a commission to settle a coal strike. The mine owners refused to accept anyone on the commission who was designated as a union man. It was perfectly acceptable for a union man to be on the commission, but he had to be called something else (i.e., "An eminent sociologist"). Until this subtlety was realized by the President, language really was a stumbling block. Terminology prevented a resolution of the crisis so long as seating a "Union man" was perceived as granting Labor's right to representation. Actually, twentieth century America is a concoction of misperceptions. In the early 1930's, for example, Americans did not perceive business organizations as "Governing bodies". Giant corporations were perceived as eminently successful rugged individuals. Another part of American fiction was that the nominal government in Washington had some kind of power to control events. However, in the daily life of the average citizen, a private organization determined when to get up in the morning, what to eat, what to wear, what working conditions would be and how leisure time would be spent. Today, the government at least attempts to govern. However ineffective it may be, the bureaucracy belatedly asserted itself and tries to regulate the special interests which control it and us. The big change in thinking which occurred during the 1930's was that the "People" were mixed into the Government=Business equation. All the regulations which had been cultivated by the business community to harness government to the promotion and development of corporations were converted into mechanisms of government regulation over the industrial complex. The change occurred for the best of reasons—it had to. The business community had been granted the license to run itself and the country into the ground and had proceeded to do so. Had necessity not been quite so compelling at the time, Americans would have been more reluctant than they were to convert from worshipping business to worshipping government. Rituals and jargon all favored the status morbus. The only problem was pragmatic—the system did not work. Of course, nothing the befuddled New Dealers did for eight years worked very effectively either until World War II bailed the country out of the Depression. In a general and abstract sense, the New Deal amounted to an admission that the old beliefs in capitalism and the mechanisms by which business controlled politics worked to everyone's worst interest. The new
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