The book/pamphlet in the background
https://fee.org/articles/hobo-screwball-and-hero/
Patric earned a loyal following from National Geographic readers as a regular contributor for years. His best-known article appeared there in March 1937. Titled “Imperial Rome Reborn,” it described his travels in Italy near the peak of Benito Mussolini’s power and influence. Some of the most prominent and allegedly well-educated architects of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal were enthralled by Il Duce’s vaunted central planning, but Patric’s article — its photographs in particular — raised the chilling specter of an egocentric dictatorship.
A few years later, as Mussolini and his Axis allies waged war on the world, Patric stirred the ire of organized labor when, in Reader’s Digest, he exposed union corruption and featherbedding in the nation’s shipbuilding industry. Called to testify before Congress, he argued that the unions were crippling productivity at a time when the nation needed all hands on deck to win World War II.
By far, the most widely read work of Patric’s was his 1943 book, Why Japan Was Strong, later retitled Yankee Hobo in the Orient for subsequent, better-known, and far more voluminous editions. A repackaging of articles first published in National Geographic, it was based on his two years of travel around Japan, China, and Korea from 1934 through 1936. True to his fiercely independent lifestyle and increasingly libertarian political views, Patric maintained that the book’s most important argument was that every individual should try to diminish “by whatever peaceful means his ingenuity may devise, the power of government — any government — to tell him what to do.”