Written on the ship purser's portable
type-writer while returning home from his own European tour in 1933,
Cumet: A Fantasy Having to do With Credit Union Mass European Tours (CUMET being an acronym for
Credit
Union
Mass
European
Tours)
is
a thirty-four page pamphlet very much
inspired by Roy Bergengren's anxieties over the potential for renewed
world war. Written in a light, conversational style and hitting on
many of the themes treated in greater depth in his 1932 book We the People, Cumet is, in
essence, a proposed strategy by which the credit union movement might
contribute to heading off such a conflict.
At the core of his
proposal is the idea that "all the peoples of the earth would,
if they could, live at peace. I believe that they need only to know
each other--for they have common hopes and joys and sorrows and a
common urge to find happiness." (34) In a world that is rich in
relationships that cross international boundaries, Bergengren argues
that war would difficult to justify, since people would viscerally
understand it as an attack upon people they care about rather than
faceless foreigners.
