Book Review: All Honorable Men

Title: All Honorable Men

Author: James Stewart Martin

Date: 1950

Publisher: Little Brown

ISBN: none

Length: 300 pages plus index

Quote: “In mid-March 1939, when a group of some of the largest British and German industrialists gathered at Düsseldorf to map plans for the economic collaboration between their two countries, the press barely reported the meetings.”

James Stewart Martin was a Maryland lawyer whose opposition to monopolies got him appointed to a wartime job investigating precisely how multinational corporations helped the Nazis begin their attacks on the U.S. and U.K.:

“In 1940, 1941 and 1942, ships leaving American seaports had had the same security measures to protect their departure. Yet many of their broken hulls and water-soaked cargoes had washed up…German submarines had spotted them within sight on shore…every man on board had been marked before the captain opened his orders. Though they may not have known it, the cargoes they carried were insured with Munich. The routine system of placing insurance had put precise information on their sailing date and destination in the hands of the Germans before the ship left port.”

All Honorable Men is an old, dusty, musty book, my copy discarded by a library because after years of wear and tear it’s fallen into neglect. This is unfortunate. Despite the author’s inability to predict which names would still be familiar today (Bayer and Monsanto are mentioned, though neither was yet seen as a very important factor in the war) and the need to keep an encyclopedia handy while reading, it’s a well-told true story illuminating just how the international good feeling of the early twentieth century would cost American lives in the next generation. International good feeling, in the sense of greed for international money and grabs for international power, subsided only slightly in the 1950s and have resurged to even more cancerous levels of corporate “growth” since the Internet has developed. Huge corporations still reach out for those international mergers that gobble up the locally owned enterprises. Today even more than in the 1930s, multinational corporations stand ready to be drafted into the service of any hotheaded demagogue who can get himself into an influential position in some desperate little country that wants to challenge the English-speaking nations for world leadership.

Once again, most of us think nothing of using the Internet to document what we’re shipping, where, at what price, whether and for how much insured, or even when we’re travelling ourselves. That information is available all over the world and the main thing protecting most of us from theft, sabotage, or worse is that most of our affairs aren’t the most enticing to criminals. For now, criminals are more interested in drugs, gold, or explosives than they are in the mundane consumer goods most of us ship and receive. Today, as in the 1930s, it seems that nobody cares about such boring data as shipping receipts and airline tickets. Tomorrow, as in the 1940s, that data could cost American lives.

So y’might say I think All Honorable Men is worth reading again, yes.