Thoughts on NDAs in our PCA churches

 

Dear PCA Elders,

   To use NDAs or not, that is the question.

Your church may have faced a situation where it was necessary to fire a staff member, or you felt it was necessary to do so. How the Elders went about that was as important as the decision itself. Perhaps your Elders have never used an NDA when terminating a staff member. If not, you might still glean some insights from this article. If you have used an NDA, I would hope it was done in a more pastoral manner than described in this article.

I’ve been an ordained TE for 40 years and I’m aware that there is a growing vibe today about ‘church abuse’  . If you’ve never heard the podcast “Sons of Patriarchy”, you might want to listen to some episodes that describe situations in the PCA or the OPC.

 What may not be clear to us as Elders is very clear to the average PCA member, i.e. our system of governance and appeal is very complicated and intimidating.

To make matters worse, it seems that our system is tilted in favor of the Elder(s). There are reasons why Biblical safeguards are in place, but it can be oppressive to members who are simply looking for an even playing field on which they can bring their concerns or complaints. We must remember that we are called to shepherd the flock without lording it over them (1 Pet 5). Leadership as demonstrated by Jesus involves a level of sacrifice and service for the sheep. Do we lead that way in our churches, be they large or small?

 The following excerpt (used by the author’s permission) is from a longer Substack article written by the wife of a former non-ordained PCA staff member. Her husband was the worship leader of a PCA church for fourteen years. Perhaps the work relationship needed to end, but the process was not pretty. Her article raises some questions that we as Elders should consider.

Even if your church is not part of the NDA culture, there may be other ways that your governance is intimidating to the average church member.

Brothers, you may not agree with the thoughts in the article, but I urge all of us to consider our ways as we await the return of the Chief Shepherd.

(Names are changed; underlines are mine for emphasis; footnote numbers pertain to references in the original article)

***

 When I read the document that my husband came home with only a few hours after he left for work on a Monday in March, particularly the sections containing the Non-Disclosure and Non-Disparagement Agreements (NDAs), embarrassment washed over me. I wasn’t embarrassed for myself or for Matt, though. I was embarrassed for the ordained pastors and elders whose moral and ethical imaginations were so stunted that they genuinely believed that trading silence for severance was walking the path of prudence.

   …= (edited for length)

I felt embarrassed for the two PCA pastors whose names were on the first page…

…When your pastors, men with whom your husband has worked for over a decade, present you with this gem of a clause, it’s hard not to feel embarrassed for them by their attempt at sounding authoritative and serious and professional:

Employee agrees to honor and remain obligated under any confidentiality agreement(s) Employee entered into with the Church or the released Parties, and nothing in this Agreement shall be deemed to limit, void, abrogate or lessen any otherwise obligation of the Employee to keep confidential any trade secret or confidential information belonging to the Church, including but not limited to any such contractual or common law confidentiality obligations Employee owes to the Church.

…Oh, the number of times I read the third point of the Non-Disparagement section and, like an alchemist watching for that most precious of metals, peer with my inner eye at the words, willing the hidden meaning to reveal itself amidst the jumbled statements that, by all appearance, said nothing at all:

Employee further understands and agrees that this paragraph is a material provision of this Agreement and that any breach of this paragraph shall be a material breach of this Agreement, and that the Church would be irreparably harmed by violation of this provision.

…And so, the terrible writing leapt out at me like a jump scare in a B-rate horror movie. I understood the individual words. I knew, basically, the facts that the pastors were trying to communicate. But writing is not just communication. Cocker spaniels communicate. Mushroom colonies communicate. Flies communicate with other flies as they alternately take off and land on a pile of feces. All living organisms communicate.
What makes writing different from mere communication is that it is a craft undertaken solely by human beings, in which a person faithfully attempts to convey reality to another person, in a meaningful exchange of ideas, through the creative use of words, and for a specific purpose. And by person I mean a human being with an immortal soul; and by reality I mean truth; and by truth I mean everything that flows from the Logos, which is Christ, the Word, the God-Man and Principle of reality itself.

 

For believers, the written word becomes a medium through which we can embody and live out the divine nature of which we are partakers (2 Peter 4:1). We do this in part by putting off “the corruption that is in the world,” including the corruption of language. We do this by treating words as more than tools to achieve our own ends, but as gifts that can bring order out of chaos, justice out of iniquity, beauty out of the wasteland. We do this because in the beginning, God spoke words, and He created us to be his word-speaking, word-writing icons here on earth.

 

The “Release of Employment” document that the pastors gave to Matt doesn’t deserve the modifier “communication.” These men, whose main job, according to their spiritual calling, is to communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ, either knowingly abandoned the effort to communicate clearly or they did so ignorantly. Either way, their actions reveal their priorities, and their priorities reveal their characters. Who needs perspicuity when you’re firing someone you’ve worked with for 15 years, someone who took spiritual vows to submit to your leadership? Later, when asked by the presbytery committee why they included the NDAs, the three elders of the Staff Oversight Team¹ said, “We use them all the time in our jobs.” So, it’s possible that after years of consuming and propagating corporate brain rot masquerading as effective communication these men lost the ability to tell clear communication from jumbled up garbage.

 

…After almost 15 years of working at the church, our pastors handed Matt a document that, if signed, would legally forbid him and his family from telling the whole truth about what happened. If he did not sign, he would get no severance, and he would go home to his homeschooling wife and children with nothing. That trading severance for silence was an unjustified act of coercion seemed like low-hanging fruit to me. So, I sent a formal complaint to my presbytery over the pastors’ inclusion of the NDAs, hoping, finally, for some clarity on the inappropriate use of coercion.

 I assumed that the PCA pastors who fired Matt (and the PCA officers investigating the charges) had read BCO 11-1 and understood that they “ha[d] no power to inflict temporal pains and penalties,” for “their authority is in all respects moral and spiritual.” I assumed that they were familiar with BCO 11-2, which states that “they can make no laws binding the conscience.”²

Perhaps they only saw themselves as the passive party in a transaction between Matt and the law already established by the State, i.e.  We didn’t make the law, which says that if he breaks the NDA we can sue him and take back all his money; we’re just going to use the threat of the law to our advantage, which is a completely different thing and very, very godly.”

One of our pastors tried to play that card when we met with him a few days after sending the initial complaint. In a demure tone that beggared sympathy he said, “Guys, I’m not just your pastor, I’m also a boss.” 

Were we supposed to be psychologically moved by his harrowing plight?
Here’s a guy who has been granted spiritual authority and institutional authority to use as he sees fit (he and the other pastor did not have to confer with the senior pastor, or even the session, before they fired their veteran worship leader), and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him? He’s burdened with so much responsibility and power, let’s cut him some slack?

 …An NDA as broad in scope as the one the pastors gave Matt, that prohibits an “Employee and Employee’s family” from making “any statements, written or verbal…that in any way criticizes the personal or business reputation, practices, management, staff, or conduct of the church,” should not exist.

What does it say about the corporatization of the pastoral mind that my former shepherds did not view the imposition of those restrictions as a form of binding our consciences? One of the pastors claimed that they never seriously intended to follow through on any of it. He implied that they were never seriously going to take us to court if I posted on Facebook (or Substack) that Matt didn’t actually “voluntarily resign.”

 

“Of course you can tell your community group and the other staff members and other members of the church, even though the contract specifically says that you’re not allowed to do that because if you do you’d be in violation of the provision and if you violate the provision the church will be irreparably harmed.”

And double-minded people everywhere nod their heads and wonder what the problem is. It’s not technically binding anyone’s conscience if you cross your fingers while tightening the noose.

But if none of it was going to be enforced, what was the point of the NDAs in the first place?

 It was a flex couched in corporate jargon, dripping with formalistic arrogance, meant to intimidate and secure the outcome that five ordained PCA officers believed to be the most advantageous to the institution. It was pragmatism and utilitarianism at work. They were playing a game. And since they were fine with lying on their end (“The church will sue you if you tell your friends and coworkers what happened in this meeting!”), they assumed that we would be fine with lying on our end (“Matt quit his job today, and everything is great between us and the leadership!”).

 …It would seem to be an inexorable law that when a church grows to a certain size — say, over 500 members — Corporate Creep sets in, and the jargon of the boardrooms, which was stolen from the tech industry and sociology departments, reverberates around conference rooms all over the country as PCA elders, coming from their long day of board meetings in conference rooms, analyze “objectives,” evaluate “input,” and emphasize “components” of “processes.”

Jargon isn’t big words and it isn’t complex sentences. Jargon is soulless; jargon is cheap; “jargon is a handout of material designed to prevent the need for thought.”⁸ Depressingly, none of our institutions are jargon-free. “The propensity for jargon and bad language,” writes Richard Mitchell, “is a sickness not of this or that calling but of thought itself.”⁹

 Jargon is what comes out of a man with a flabby spirit, and “mens cujusque is est quisque.”¹⁰ (Cicero, “As is the mind, so is the man.”)

When people sit around and use jargon, whether in speech or in writing, they are essentially saying, “I have given up my God-given responsibility to think clearly, and I am now going to use some words, and my words will mean things, and the things will result in happenings, and the happenings will hopefully get me what I want so that I can leave.”

 

…Richard Mitchell calls this move the Principle of Unnecessary Specification; its “practitioners are traditionally careful not only to provide detailed specification where none is needed but also to withhold it where it is needed.”¹¹ They do this because they can. They do this because, “skillfully used, it projects an atmosphere, one might even say an aroma, of great insight and expertise about anything [they] might write.”¹²

 

My former pastors did this when they told Matt that, in order to get severance, he had to promise not to give away any “trade secrets” or Super Secret Confidential Information that he had been (apparently) gathering during his 15 years as worship leader and AV coordinator. They did this when they left out the specifics about how the church would be irreparably harmed if “the church” found out the truth about how and why Matt was fired. The Principle of Unnecessary Specification muddies the discursive waters until it’s not even worth sifting through the murky mess anymore. And that, my friends, is precisely its goal.

 Francis Bacon said, “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; writing an exact man.”

 What are our PCA elder-bosses reading, or not reading, that contributes to their lack of a robust ethical imagination? What are our PCA Executive Pastors conferring about, or not conferring about, that leaves their ideas so out of touch with reality? What are our PCA shepherds writing, or not writing, that keeps their thinking so muddied?

 …But in the spirit of Christian charity, let me suggest more for the ordained PCA officer.

I propose that he put down the Human Resources twaddle and pick up some classic fiction; The Brothers Karamazov is a good place to start, particularly the chapter called “The Grand Inquisitor.” He should read Malcolm Guite’s epic poem, Galahad and the Grail, recognize where he’s still trapped in the Wasteland, and long for transformation. He should pick up a pen and try writing poetry, like a real man. He should read the political philosophy of Frederic Bastiat and the metaphysical ideas of Josef Pieper, then accept that manipulation is tyranny. He should read Ross Bryd’s article, The Future Of Our Churches, and reconsider the nature of spiritual leadership and the role of the shepherd.

 Or the PCA officer can ignore the corporatization of his pastoral mind and succumb to jargon’s long march through the institutional church.

 

Tim Walz as the Biden copycat

 

Tim Walz has taken over as liar in chief regarding one's personal life stories. Biden was notorious for his life experience fabrications, and now Walz is taking up the mantle. 

Walz lied about his DUI issues 30 years ago

Walz lied about his military record and service. He did not retire as a Command Sargent Major. That lie was even repeated at the opening day of a DNC event after being debunked weeks ago. 

Walz still lies about the importance of IVF for him and his wife. 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/walz-children-conceived-through-iui-not-ivf-despite-statements-what-to-know/ar-AA1p7Ruv

If he'll lie about his own kids in order to gain power of the American people, then there's nothing he won't do to get that power and keep it. 

As for Biden, he talked so much about how Trump and MAGA are a threat to Democracy, but it's his own party that ditched democracy by staging a coup on Biden. 
Karma is a ....

The Dems have never answered the question of  "If Biden is so competent and consequential, then why did he step aside?"  Was it just to save democracy?

If he's not competent, then why is he still President? 

WHO GOES NAZI? Dorothy Thompson 1941

 

An interesting exercise today 2024 would be to ask "Who goes Woke/Collectivist-Authoritarian?"

Who goes Nazi – Dorothy Thompson  circa 1941

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”

Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

At any rate, let us look round the room.

The gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass of whiskey beside him on the mantelpiece is Mr. A, a descendant of one of the great American families. There has never been an American Blue Book without several persons of his surname in it. He is poor and earns his living as an editor. He has had a classical education, has a sound and cultivated taste in literature, painting, and music; has not a touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy, and wit. He was a lieutenant in the World War, is a Republican in politics, but voted twice for Roosevelt, last time for Willkie. He is modest, not particularly brilliant, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys the company of pretty and witty women. His wife, whom he adored, is dead, and he will never remarry.

He has never attracted any attention because of outstanding bravery. But I will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a Nazi. He would greatly dislike fighting them, but they could never convert him. . . . Why not?

Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous racing stable, vice-president of a bank, married to a well-known society belle. He is a good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi he would certainly join up, and early. Why? . . . Why the one and not the other?

Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions.

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C (Avery Brundage) is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.

Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.

There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

I think young D over there is the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others.

Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him very young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius, and that there is something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her. He neglects her completely and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement. She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women.

On the other hand, Mrs. F would never go Nazi. She is the most popular woman in the room, handsome, gay, witty, and full of the warmest emotion. She was a popular actress ten years ago; married very happily; promptly had four children in a row; has a charming house, is not rich but has no money cares, has never cut herself off from her own happy-go-lucky profession, and is full of sound health and sound common sense. All men try to make love to her; she laughs at them all, and her husband is amused. She has stood on her own feet since she was a child, she has enormously helped her husband’s career (he is a lawyer), she would ornament any drawing-room in any capital, and she is as American as ice cream and cake.

II

How about the butler who is passing the drinks? I look at James with amused eyes. James is safe. James has been butler to the ‘ighest aristocracy, considers all Nazis parvenus and communists, and has a very good sense for “people of quality.” He serves the quiet editor with that friendly air of equality which good servants always show toward those they consider good enough to serve, and he serves the horsy gent stiffly and coldly.

Bill, the grandson of the chauffeur, is helping serve to-night. He is a product of a Bronx public school and high school, and works at night like this to help himself through City College, where he is studying engineering. He is a “proletarian,” though you’d never guess it if you saw him without that white coat. He plays a crack game of tennis—has been a tennis tutor in summer resorts—swims superbly, gets straight A’s in his classes, and thinks America is okay and don’t let anybody say it isn’t. He had a brief period of Youth Congress communism, but it was like the measles. He was not taken in the draft because his eyes are not good enough, but he wants to design airplanes, “like Sikorsky.” He thinks Lindbergh is “just another pilot with a build-up and a rich wife” and that he is “always talking down America, like how we couldn’t lick Hitler if we wanted to.” At this point Bill snorts.

Mr. G is a very intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been concerned with general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to suggest improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he was too bound to Catholic philosophy. So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be purged.

H is an historian and biographer. He is American of Dutch ancestry born and reared in the Middle West. He has been in love with America all his life. He can recite whole chapters of Thoreau and volumes of American poetry, from Emerson to Steve Benet. He knows Jefferson’s letters, Hamilton’s papers, Lincoln’s speeches. He is a collector of early American furniture, lives in New England, runs a farm for a hobby and doesn’t lose much money on it, and loathes parties like this one. He has a ribald and manly sense of humor, is unconventional and lost a college professorship because of a love affair. Afterward he married the lady and has lived happily ever afterward as the wages of sin.

H has never doubted his own authentic Americanism for one instant. This is his country, and he knows it from Acadia to Zenith. His ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and in all the wars since. He is certainly an intellectual, but an intellectual smelling slightly of cow barns and damp tweeds. He is the most good-natured and genial man alive, but if anyone ever tries to make this country over into an imitation of Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, or Petain’s systems H will grab a gun and fight. Though H’s liberalism will not permit him to say it, it is his secret conviction that nobody whose ancestors have not been in this country since before the Civil War really understands America or would really fight for it against Nazism or any other foreign ism in a showdown.

But H is wrong. There is one other person in the room who would fight alongside H and he is not even an American citizen. He is a young German emigre, whom I brought along to the party. The people in the room look at him rather askance because he is so Germanic, so very blond-haired, so very blue-eyed, so tanned that somehow you expect him to be wearing shorts. He looks like the model of a Nazi. His English is flawed—he learned it only five years ago. He comes from an old East Prussian family; he was a member of the post-war Youth Movement and afterward of the Republican “Reichsbanner.” All his German friends went Nazi—without exception. He hiked to Switzerland penniless, there pursued his studies in New Testament Greek, sat under the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, came to America through the assistance of an American friend whom he had met in a university, got a job teaching the classics in a fashionable private school; quit, and is working now in an airplane factory—working on the night shift to make planes to send to Britain to defeat Germany. He has devoured volumes of American history, knows Whitman by heart, wonders why so few Americans have ever really read the Federalist papers, believes in the United States of Europe, the Union of the English-speaking world, and the coming democratic revolution all over the earth. He believes that America is the country of Creative Evolution once it shakes off its middle-class complacency, its bureaucratized industry, its tentacle-like and spreading government, and sets itself innerly free.

The people in the room think he is not an American, but he is more American than almost any of them. He has discovered America and his spirit is the spirit of the pioneers. He is furious with America because it does not realize its strength and beauty and power. He talks about the workmen in the factory where he is employed. . . . He took the job “in order to understand the real America.” He thinks the men are wonderful. “Why don’t you American intellectuals ever get to them; talk to them?”

I grin bitterly to myself, thinking that if we ever got into war with the Nazis he would probably be interned, while Mr. B and Mr. G and Mrs. E would be spreading defeatism at all such parties as this one. “Of course I don’t like Hitler but . . .”

Mr. J over there is a Jew. Mr. J is a very important man. He is immensely rich—he has made a fortune through a dozen directorates in various companies, through a fabulous marriage, through a speculative flair, and through a native gift for money and a native love of power. He is intelligent and arrogant. He seldom associates with Jews. He deplores any mention of the “Jewish question.” He believes that Hitler “should not be judged from the standpoint of anti-Semitism.” He thinks that “the Jews should be reserved on all political questions.” He considers Roosevelt “an enemy of business.” He thinks “It was a serious blow to the Jews that Frankfurter should have been appointed to the Supreme Court.”

The saturnine Mr. C—the real Nazi in the room—engages him in a flatteringly attentive conversation. Mr. J agrees with Mr. C wholly. Mr. J is definitely attracted by Mr. C. He goes out of his way to ask his name—they have never met before. “A very intelligent man.”

Mr. K contemplates the scene with a sad humor in his expressive eyes. Mr. K is also a Jew. Mr. K is a Jew from the South. He speaks with a Southern drawl. He tells inimitable stories. Ten years ago he owned a very successful business that he had built up from scratch. He sold it for a handsome price, settled his indigent relatives in business, and now enjoys an income for himself of about fifty dollars a week. At forty he began to write articles about odd and out-of-the-way places in American life. A bachelor, and a sad man who makes everybody laugh, he travels continually, knows America from a thousand different facets, and loves it in a quiet, deep, unostentatious way. He is a great friend of H, the biographer. Like H, his ancestors have been in this country since long before the Civil War. He is attracted to the young German. By and by they are together in the drawing-room. The impeccable gentleman of New England, the country-man—intellectual of the Middle West, the happy woman whom the gods love, the young German, the quiet, poised Jew from the South. And over on the other side are the others.

Mr. L has just come in. Mr. L is a lion these days. My hostess was all of a dither when she told me on the telephone, “ . . . and L is coming. You know it’s dreadfully hard to get him.” L is a very powerful labor leader. “My dear, he is a man of the people, but really fascinating.“ L is a man of the people and just exactly as fascinating as my horsy, bank vice-president, on-the-make acquaintance over there, and for the same reasons and in the same way. L makes speeches about the “third of the nation,” and L has made a darned good thing for himself out of championing the oppressed. He has the best car of anyone in this room; salary means nothing to him because he lives on an expense account. He agrees with the very largest and most powerful industrialists in the country that it is the business of the strong to boss the weak, and he has made collective bargaining into a legal compulsion to appoint him or his henchmen as “labor’s” agents, with the power to tax pay envelopes and do what they please with the money. L is the strongest natural-born Nazi in this room. Mr. B regards him with contempt tempered by hatred. Mr. B will use him. L is already parroting B’s speeches. He has the brains of Neanderthal man, but he has an infallible instinct for power. In private conversation he denounces the Jews as “parasites.” No one has ever asked him what are the creative functions of a highly paid agent, who takes a percentage off the labor of millions of men, and distributes it where and as it may add to his own political power.

III

It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities.

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.

Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.