Proclaim Liberty!
by Gilbert Seldes · English · Gutenberg #34890 · 387,993 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Proclaim Liberty!
Author: Gilbert Seldes
Release date: January 8, 2011 [eBook #34890]
Language: English
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* * * * *
PROCLAIM LIBERTY!
ALSO by GILBERT SELDES
On Related Subjects
Your Money and Your Life
Mainland
The Years of the Locust
Against Revolution
The Stammering Century
The Seven Living Arts
The United States and the War
(London, 1917)
This is America
(Moving Picture)
AND
The Movies Come From America
The Movies and the Talkies
The Future of Drinking
The Wings of the Eagle
Lysistrata (A Modern Version)
_Proclaim_
LIBERTY!
_By_
GILBERT SELDES
Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto them....
Leviticus xxv, 10.
[Illustration]
THE GREYSTONE PRESS
NEW YORK
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE WILLIAM BYRD PRESS, INC.
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
TO THE CHILDREN
who will have
to live in the world
we are making
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are given to the Macmillan Company for their permission to
quote several paragraphs from Arthur Koestler's _Darkness at Noon_ in
my first chapter. _The Grand Strategy_ by H.A. Sargeaunt and Geoffrey
West, referred to in chapter two, is published by Thomas Y. Crowell
Co.
G.S.
Contents
PAGE
CHAPTER I TOTAL VICTORY 13
CHAPTER II STRATEGY FOR THE CITIZEN 29
CHAPTER III UNITED...? 44
CHAPTER IV "THE STRATEGY OF TRUTH" 61
CHAPTER V THE FORGOTTEN DOCUMENT 77
CHAPTER VI "THE POPULATION OF THESE STATES" 92
CHAPTER VII ADDRESS TO EUROPE 111
CHAPTER VIII THE SCIENCE OF SHORT WAVE 119
CHAPTER IX DEFINITION OF AMERICA 129
CHAPTER X POPULARITY AND POLITICS 156
CHAPTER XI THE TOOLS OF DEMOCRACY 163
CHAPTER XII DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 170
CHAPTER XIII THE LIBERTY BELL 199
PROCLAIM LIBERTY!
CHAPTER I
Total Victory
The peril we are in today is this:
For the first time since we became a nation, a power exists strong
enough to destroy us.
This book is about the strength we have to destroy our enemies--where
it lies, what hinders it, how we can use it. It is not about
munitions, but about men and women; it deals with the unity we have to
create, the victory we have to win; it deals with the character of
America, what it has been and is and will be. And since character is
destiny, this book is about the destiny of America.
The next few pages are in the nature of counter-propaganda. With the
best of motives, and the worst results, Americans for months after
December 7, 1941, said that Pearl Harbor was a costly blessing because
it united all Americans and made us understand why the war was
inevitable. A fifty-mile bus trip outside of New York--perhaps even a
subway ride within its borders--would have proved both of these
statements blandly and dangerously false. American unity could not be
made in Japan; like most other imports from that country, it was a
cheap imitation, lasting a short time, and costly in the long run; and
recognition of the nature of the war can never come as the result of
anything but a realistic analysis of our own purposes as well as those
of our enemies.
What follows is, obviously, the work of a citizen, not a specialist.
For some twenty years I have observed the sources of American unity
and dispersion; during the past fifteen years my stake in the future
of American liberty has been the most important thing in my life, as
it is the most important thing in the life of anyone whose children
will live in the world we are now creating. I am therefore not
writing frivolously, or merely to testify to my devotion; I am
writing to persuade--to uncover sources of strength which others may
have overlooked, to create new weapons, to stir new thoughts. If I
thought the war for freedom could be won by writing lies, I would
write lies. I am afraid the war will be lost if we do not face the
truth, so I write what I believe to be true about America--about its
past and present and future, meaning its history and character and
destiny--but mostly about the present, with only a glance at our
forgotten past, and a declaration of faith in the future which is, I
hope, the inevitable result of our victory.
We know the name and character of our enemy--the Axis; but after
months of war we are not entirely convinced that it intends to destroy
us because we do not see why it has to destroy us. Destroy; not
defeat. The desperate war we are fighting is still taken as a gigantic
maneuvre; obviously the Axis wants to "win" battles and dictate "peace
terms". We still use these phrases of 1918, unaware that the purpose
of Axis war is not defeat of an enemy, but destruction of his national
life. We have seen it happen in France and Poland and Norway and
Holland; but we cannot imagine that the Nazis intend actually to
appoint a German Governor General over the Mississippi Valley, a
Gauleiter in the New England provinces, and forbid us to read
newspapers, go to the movies or drink coffee; we cannot believe that
the Axis intends to destroy the character of America, annihilating the
liberties our ancestors fought for, and the level of comfort which we
cherished so scrupulously in later generations. In moments of pure
speculation, when we wonder what would happen "at worst", we think of
a humiliating defeat on land and sea, bombardment of our cities,
surrender--and a peace conference at which we and Britain agree to pay
indemnities; perhaps, until we pay off, German and Japanese soldiers
would be quartered in our houses, police our streets; but we assume
that after the "shooting war" was over, they would not ravish our
women.
_Victory_ (_Axis Model_)
All this is the war of 1918. In 1942 the purpose of Axis victory is
the destruction of the American system, the annihilation of the
financial and industrial power of the United States, the reduction of
this country to an inferior position in the world and the enslavement
of the American people by depriving them of their liberty and of their
wealth. The actual physical slavery of the American people and the
deliberate taking over of our factories and farms and houses and motor
cars and radios are both implied in an Axis victory; the enslavement
is automatic, the robbery of our wealth will depend on Axis economic
strategy: if we can produce more _for them_ by remaining in technical
possession of our factories, they will let us keep them.
We cannot believe this is so because we see no reason for it. Our
intentions toward the German and Italian people are not to enslave and
impoverish; on the contrary, we think of the defeat of their leaders
as the beginning of liberty. We do not intend to make Venice a
tributary city, nor Essen a factory town run by American government
officials. We may police the streets of Berlin until a democratic
government proves its strength by punishing the SS and the Gestapo,
until the broken prisoners of Dachau return in whatever triumph they
can still enjoy. But our basic purpose is still to defeat the armed
forces of the Axis and to insure ourselves against another war by the
creation of free governments everywhere.
(Neither the American people nor their leaders have believed that a
responsible peaceable government can be erected _now_ in Japan. Toward
the Japanese our unclarified intentions are simple: annihilation of
the power, to such an extent that it cannot rise again--as a military
or a commercial rival. The average citizen would probably be glad to
hand over to the Chinese the job of governing Japan.)
Fortunately, the purposes of any war alter as the war goes on; as we
fight we discover the reasons for fighting and the intensity of our
effort, the cost of victory, the danger of defeat, all compel us to
think desperately about the kind of peace for which we are fighting.
The vengeful articles of the treaty of Versailles were written after
the Armistice by politicians; the constructive ones were created
during the war, and it is quite possible that they would have been
accepted by Americans if the United States had fought longer and
therefore thought longer about them.
We shall probably have time to think out a good peace in this war. But
we will not create peace of any kind unless we know why an Axis peace
means annihilation for us; and why, at the risk of defeat in the field
and revolution at home, the Axis powers had to go to war on the United
States.
If we impose our moral ideas upon the future, the attack on Pearl
Harbor will stand as the infamous immediate cause of the war; by Axis
standards, Pearl Harbor was the final incident of one series of
events, the first incident of another, all having the same purpose,
the destruction of American democracy--which, so long as it endured,
undermined the strength of the totalitarian powers.
Why? Why are Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo insecure if we survive? Why
were we in danger so long as they were victorious? The answer lies in
the character of the two groups of nations; in all great tragedy, the
_reason_ has to be found in the character of those involved; the war
is tragic, in noble proportions, and we have to know the character of
our enemy, the character of our own people, too, to understand why it
was inevitable--and how we will win.
Our character, molded by our past, upholds or betrays us in our
present crisis, and so creates our future. That is the sense in which
character is Destiny.
We know everything hateful about our enemies; long before the war
began we knew the treachery of the Japanese military caste, the jackal
aggression of Mussolini, the brutality and falseness of Hitler; and
the enthusiastic subservience of millions of people to each of these
leaders.
But these things do not explain why we are a danger to the Axis, and
the Axis to us.
"_Historic Necessity_"
The profound necessity underlying this war rises from the nature of
fascism: it is a combination of forces and ideas; the forces are new,
but the basic ideas have occurred at least once before in history, as
the Feudal Order. Democracy destroyed Feudalism; and Feudalism,
returning in a new form as Fascism, must destroy democracy or go down
in the attempt; the New Order and the New World cannot exist side by
side, because they are both expanding forces; they have touched one
another and only one will survive. We might blindly let the new
despotism live although it is the most expansive and dynamic force
since 1776; but it cannot let us live. We could co-exist with Czarism
because it was a shrinking force; or with British Imperialism because
its peak of expansion was actually reached before ours began. We could
not have lived side by side with Trotskyite Communism because it was
as aggressive as the exploding racialism of the German Nazis.
As it happened, Stalin, not Trotsky, took over from Lenin; Socialism
in one country supplanted "the permanent revolution". Stalin made a
sort of peace with all the world; he called off his dogs of
propaganda; he allowed German Communism to be beaten to death in
concentration camps; and, as Trotsky might have said, the "historical
obligation" to destroy capitalist-democracy was undertaken not by the
bearded old Marxian enemies of Capital, but by Capital's own young
sadists, the Storm Troopers, called in by the frightened bankers and
manufacturers of Italy and Germany. That is why, since 1932, realist
democrats have known that the enemy had to be Hitler, not Stalin. It
was not a choice between ideologies; it was a choice between degrees
of expansion. Moreover, Stalin himself recognized the explosive force
of fascism in Germany and shrank within his own borders; he withdrew
factories to the Urals, he dispersed his units of force as far from
the German border as he could. By doing so, he became the ideal ally
of all those powers whom Hitler's expanding pressure was discommoding.
The relatively static democratic nations of Europe, the shrinking
semi-socialist states like France and Austria, were bruised by contact
with Hitler; presently they were absorbed because the Nazi geography
demanded a continent for a military base.
The destruction of America was a geographical necessity, for Hitler;
and something more. Geographically, the United States lies between
Hitler's enemies, England and Russia; we are not accustomed to the
thought, but the fact is that we are a transatlantic base for
England's fleet; so long as we are undefeated, the fleet remains a
threat to Germany. Look at the other side: we are a potential
transpacific base for Russia; our fleet can supply the Soviets and
China; Russia can retreat toward Siberian ports and join us. So we
dominate the two northern oceans, and with Russia, the Arctic as well.
That is the geographic reason for Hitler's attack on us.
The moral reason is greater than the strategic reason: the history of
the United States must be destroyed, its future must turn black and
bitter; because fasci-feudalism, the new order, cannot rest firmly on
its foundations until Democracy perishes from the earth.
So long as a Democracy (with a comparatively high standard of living)
survives, the propaganda of fascism must fail; the essence of that
propaganda is that democratic nations cannot combine liberty and
security. In order to have security, says Hitler, you must give up
will and want, freedom of action and utterance; you must be
disciplined and ordered--because the modern world is too complex to
allow for the will of the individual. The democracies insist that the
rich complexity of the world was created by democratic freedom and
that production, distribution, security and progress have not yet
outstripped the capacity of man, so that there is room for the private
life, the undisciplined, even the un-social. The essential democratic
belief in "progress" is not a foolish optimism, it is basic belief in
the desirability of _change_; and we, democratic people, believe that
the critical unregimented individual must have some leeway so that
progress will be made. The terror of change in which dictators live is
shown in their constant appeal to permanence; we know that the only
thing permanent in life is change; when change ceases, life ceases. It
does not surprise us that the logic of fascism ends in death.
So long as the democratic nations achieve change without revolution,
and prosperity without regimentation, the Nazi states are in danger.
In a few generations they may indoctrinate their people to love
poverty and ignorance, to fear independence; for fascism, the next
twenty years are critical. Unless we, the democratic people, are
destroyed now, the fascist adults of 1940 to 1960 will still know that
freedom and wealth co-exist in this world and are better than slavery.
So much--which is enough--was true even before the declaration of war;
since then the nazi-fascists must prove that democracies cannot defend
themselves, cannot sacrifice comfort, cannot invent and produce
engines of war, cannot win victories. And we are equally compelled,
for our own safety, to destroy the _principle_ which tries to destroy
us. The alternative to victory over America is therefore not
defeat--or an inconclusive truce. The alternative is annihilation for
the fascist regime and death for hundreds of thousands of nazi party
men. They will be liquidated because when they are defeated they will
no longer have a function to perform; their only function is the
organization of victory.
The fascist powers are expanding and are situated so that with their
subordinates, they can control the world. And the purpose of their
military expansion is to exclude certain nations from the markets of
the world. Even for the "self sufficient" United States, this means
that the standard of living must go down--drastically and for ever.
The policy is not entirely new. It develops from tariff barriers and
subsidies; we have suffered from it at the hands of our best
friends--under the Stevenson Act regulating rubber prices, for
instance; we have profited by it, as when we refused to sell helium to
Germany or when our tariff laws kept Britain and France out of our
markets, so that they never were able to pay their war debts. This
means only that we have been living in a capitalist world and have
defended ourselves against other capitalists, as well as we could.
_Revolution in Reverse_
The new thing under nazi-fascism is the destruction of private
business, buying and selling. As trade is the basic activity of our
time, nazi-fascism is revolutionary; it is also reactionary; and there
is nothing in the world more dangerous than a reactionary revolution.
The Communist revolution was radical and whoever had any stake in the
world--a house, a car, a job--shied away from the uncertainty of the
future. But the reactionary revolution of Mussolini and Hitler
instantly captivated the rich and well-born; to them, fascism was not
a mere protection against the Reds, it was a positive return to the
days of absolute authority; it was the annihilation of a hundred and
fifty years of Democracy, it blotted out the French and American
Revolutions, it erased the names of Napoleon and Garibaldi from
Continental European history, leaving the name of Metternich all the
more splendid in its isolation. The manufacturers of motor cars and
munitions were terrified of Reds in the factories; the great bankers
and landowners looked beyond the momentary danger, and they embraced
fascism because they hoped it would destroy the power let loose by the
World War--which was first political and then economic democracy.
This was, in theory, correct; fascism meant to destroy democracy, but
it had to destroy capitalism with it. The idiots who ran the
financial and industrial world in the 1920's proved their incompetence
by the end of 1929; but their frivolous and irresponsible minds were
exposed years earlier when they began to support the power which by
its own confessed character had to destroy them. It is a pleasant
irony that ten minutes with Karl Marx or Lenin or with a parlor pink
could have shown the great tycoons that they were committing suicide.
Only an enemy can really appreciate Karl Marx. The faithful have to
concentrate on the future coming of the Communists' Millenium; but the
sceptic can admire the cool analysis of the past by which Marx arrived
at his criticism of the Capitalist System. In that analysis Marx
simplifies history so:
No economic system lives for ever.
Each system has in it the germ of its own successor.
The feudal system came to its end when Columbus broke through its
geographical walls. (Gutenburg and Leonardo and a thousand others
broke through its intellectual walls at about the same time, and
Luther through the social and religious barriers.)
With these clues we can see that Democratic Capitalism is the
successor to Feudalism.
From this point Marx had to go into prophecy and according to his
followers he did rather well in predicting the next stages: he saw, in
the 1860's, the kind of capitalism we enjoyed in 1914. He did not see
all its results--the enormous increase in the number of prosperous
families was not in his calculations and he might have been surprised
to see the least, not the most, industrialized country fall first into
Communism. But to the sceptic only one thing in the Marxian prophecy
is important. He says that in the later stages of Capitalism, it will
become incompetent; it will not be able to handle the tools of
production and distribution; and suddenly or gradually, it will change
into a _new_ system. (According to Marx, this new system will be
Communism.)
There were moments under the grim eyes of Mr. Hoover when all the
parts of this prophecy seemed to have been fulfilled. There are
apparently some Americans who wish that the New Deal had not
interposed itself between the Gold Standard and the Red Flag.
These are the great leaders (silenced now by war) who might have
studied Marx before flirting with the fascists. For even the
rudimentary analysis above shows that Capitalism cannot _grow into_
fascism; fascism moves _backward_ from democratic capitalism, it moves
into the system which democracy destroyed--the feudal system. The
capitalist system may be headed for slow or sudden death if it goes on
as it is; it may have a long life if it can adapt itself to the world
it has itself created; but in every sense of the words, capitalism has
no future if it goes back to the past. And fascism is the discarded
past of capitalism.
We think we know this now because the fasci-feudal states have
declared war on us. Now we see how natural is the alliance between the
European states who wish to restore feudalism and the Asiatic state
which never abandoned it. Now we recognize the Nazi or Fascist party
as the equivalent of feudal nobles and in "labor battalions" we see
the outlines of serfs cringing from their masters. But we do not yet
see that a feudal state cannot live in the same world as a free
state--and that we are as committed to destroy fascism as Hitler is to
destroy democracy.
We strike back at Japan because Japan attacked us, and fight Germany
and Italy because they declared war on us; but we will not win the war
until we understand that the Axis had to attack us and that we must
destroy the system which made the attack inevitable.
_Walled Town and Open Door_
At first glance, the feudal nature of fascism seems unimportant. In
pure logic, maybe, feudal and democratic systems cannot co-exist, but
in fact, feudal Japan did exist in 1830 and the United States was
enjoying Jacksonian democracy. There must be something more than
abstract hostility between the two systems.
There is. Feudalism is a walled town; democracy is a ship at sea and a
covered wagon. The capitalist pioneer gaps every wall in his path and
his path is everywhere. The defender of the wall must destroy the
invader before he comes near. In commercial terms, the fascists must
conquer us in order to eliminate us as competitors for world trade. We
can understand the method if we compare fascism at peace with
democracy at war.
In the first days of the war we abandoned several essential freedoms:
speech and press and radio and assembly as far as they might affect
the conduct of the war; and then, with more of a struggle, we gave up
the right to manufacture motor cars, the right to buy or sell tires;
we accepted an allotment of sugar; we abandoned the right to go into
the business of manufacturing radio sets; we allowed the government to
limit our installment buying; we neither got nor gave credit as freely
as before; we gave up, in short, the system of civil liberty and free
business enterprise--in order to win the war.
Six hundred years ago, all over Europe the economy of peace was
exactly our economy of war. In the Middle Ages, the _right_ to become
a watchmaker did not exist; the guild of watchmakers accepted or
rejected an applicant. By this limitation, the total number of watches
produced was roughly governed; the price was also established (and
overcharging was a grave offense in the Middle Ages). Foreign
competition was excluded; credit was for financiers, and the
installment system had not been invented.
The feudalism of six hundred years ago is the peace-time fascism of
six years ago. The fascist version of feudalism is State control of
production. In Nazi Germany the liberty to work at a trade, to
manufacture a given article, to stop working, to change professions,
were all seriously limited. The supply of materials was regulated by
the State, the number of radios to be exported was set by the State
in connection with the purchase of strategic imports; the State could
encourage or prevent the importation of coffee or helium or silk
stockings; it could and did force men and women to raise crops, to
make fuses, to learn flying, to stop reading. It created a feudal
state far more benighted than any in the actual Middle Ages; it was in
peace _totally_ coordinated for production--far more so than we are
now, at war.
The purpose of our sacrifice of liberty is to make things a thousand
times faster than before; to save raw materials we abolish the cuff on
our trousers and we use agate pots instead of aluminum; we work longer
hours and work harder; we keep machines going twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week--all for the single purpose of maximum output.
For the same purpose, the fascist state is organized _at peace_--to
out-produce and _under-sell_ its competitors.
The harried German people gave up their freedom in order to recover
prosperity. They became a nation of war-workers in an economic war. A
vast amount of their production went into tanks and Stukas; another
segment went into export goods to be traded for strategic materials;
and only a small amount went for food and the comforts of life. Almost
nothing went into luxuries.
_Burning Books--and Underselling_
That is why the _internal_ affairs of Germany became of surpassing
importance to us. Whether we knew it or not, we were in competition
with the labor battalions. When we denounced the Nazi suppression of
free speech, the jailing of religious leaders, the silencing of
Catholics, the persecution of Jews, we were as correct economically as
we were ethically; the destruction of liberty had to be accomplished
in Germany as the comfort level fell, to prevent criticism and
conflict. Because liberals were tortured and books burned and Jews and
Catholics given over to satisfy a frightful appetite for hatred, the
people of Germany were kept longer at their work, and got less and
less butter, and made more and more steel to undersell us in Soviet
Russia or the Argentine; they made also more and more submarines to
sink our ships if we ever came to war. Every liberty erased by Hitler
was an economic attack on us, it made slave labor a more effective
competitor to our free labor. The concentration camp and the
blackguards on the streets were all part of an _economic_ policy, to
create a feudal serfdom in the place of free labor. If the policy
succeeds, we will have to break down our standard of living and give
up entirely our habits of freedom, in order to meet the competition of
slave labor.
It means today that we will not have cheap motor cars and presently it
may mean that we will not have high test steel or meat every day.
Victory for the Axis system means that we work for the Germans and the
Japanese, literally, actually, on their terms, in factories bossed by
their local representatives; and anything less than complete victory
for us means that we work harder and longer for less and less, paying
for defeat by accepting a mean standard of living, not daring to fight
our way into the markets of the world which fascism has closed to us.
Readers of _You Can't Do Business With Hitler_ will not need to be
convinced again that the two systems--his and ours--are mutually
incompatible. Fortunately for us, they are also mutually destructive.
The basis of fascism is, as I have noted, the feudal hope of a fixed
unchangeable form of society which will last forever; the basis of
democracy is change (which we call progress). Hitler announces that
nazism will last a thousand years; the Japanese assert that their
society has lasted longer; and the voice of Mussolini, when it used to
be heard, spoke of Ancient Rome. We who are too impatient of the past,
and need to understand our tradition, are at any rate aware of one
thing--it is a tradition of change. (Jefferson to Lincoln to Theodore
Roosevelt--the acceptance of change, even of radical change, is basic
in American history.)
We might tolerate the tactics of fascism; the racial hatred, the false
system of education, the attack on religion, all might pass if they
weren't part of the great strategic process of the fascists, which is
our mortal enemy, as our process is theirs. They exclude and we
penetrate; they have to _destroy_ liberty in order to control making
and buying and selling and using steel and bread and radios, and we
have to _create_ liberty in order to create more customers for more
things. They have to suppress dissent because dissent means difference
which no feudal system can afford; we have to encourage criticism
because only free inquiry destroys error and discovers new and useful
truths.
These hostile actions make us enemies because our penetration will not
accept the Axis wall thrown up around nations normally free and
friendly to us; and the Axis must make us into fascists because there
can be no exceptions in a system dedicated to conformity. The whole
world must accept a world-system.
In particular, we must be eliminated because we do expose the fraud of
fascism--which is that liberty must be sacrificed to attain power.
This is an open principle of fascism, as it is of all dictatorships
and "total" states. It is very appealing to tyrants and to weaklings,
and the ruthlessness of the attack on liberty seems "realistic" even
to believers in democracy--especially during the critical moments when
action is needed and democracies seem to do nothing but talk. The
truth is that our Executive is tremendously prompt and unhampered in
war time; the appeaser of fascism does not tell the truth; he wants an
end to talk, which is dangerous, because he is always at war and the
secret fascist would have to admit that his perpetual war is against
the people of the United States. So he says only that in modern times,
liberty is too great a luxury, too easily abused; he says that a great
State is too delicately balanced to tolerate the whims and
idiosyncrasies of individuals; if the State has discovered the best
diet for all the citizens, then no citizen can "prefer" another diet,
and no expert may cast doubt on the official rations. To cause
uncertainty is to diminish efficiency; to back "wrong" ideas is
treason.
One of the best descriptions of this state of mind occurs in a page of
Arthur Koester's _Darkness at Noon_. It is fiction, but not untrue:
"A short time ago, our leading agriculturist, B., was shot with
thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion
that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. No. 1 is
all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be
liquidated as _saboteurs_. In a nationally centralized
agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of
enormous importance: it can decide the issue of the next war.
If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him, and the
execution of the thirty-one men will be a mere bagatelle. If he
was wrong....
"It is that alone that matters: who is objectively in the
right. The cricket-moralists are agitated by quite another
problem: whether B. was subjectively in good faith when he
recommended nitrogen. If he was not, according to their ethics
he should be shot, even if it should subsequently be shown that
nitrogen would have been better after all. If he was in good
faith, then he should be acquitted and allowed to continue
making propaganda for nitrate, even if the country should be
ruined by it....
"That is, of course, complete nonsense. For us the question of
subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong
must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That is the
law of historical credit; it was our law."
Intellectual fascists are particularly liable to the error of thinking
that this sort of thing is above morality, beyond good and evil. The
"cricket-moralists" are people like ourselves and the English, who are
agitated because "innocent" men are put to death; the hard-headed ones
answer that innocence isn't important; effectiveness is what counts.
Yet the democratic-cricket-morality is in the long run more realistic
than the tough school which kills its enemies first and then finds out
if they were guilty. The reason we allow a scientist to cry for
nitrates after we have decided on potash is that we have to keep
scientific investigation alive; we cannot trust ourselves for too long
to the potash group. In five years, both nitrate and potash may be
discarded because we have found something better. And no scientist
will for long retain his critical pioneering spirit if an official
superior can reject his research. (An Army board rejected the research
of General William Mitchell and it took a generation for Army men to
recover initiative; and this was in an organization accustomed to
respect rank and tradition. In science, which is more sensitive, the
only practical thing is to reward the heretic and the explorer even
while one adopts the idea of the orthodox.)
This question of heresy, apparently so trifling, is critical for us
because it is a clue to the weakness of Hitlerism and it provides us
with the only strategy by which Hitlerism can be destroyed.
CHAPTER II
Strategy for the Citizen
There is a tendency at this moment to consider Hitler a master
strategist, master psychologist, master statesman. His analysis of
democracy, however, leaves something unsaid, and the nervous strong
men who admire Hitler, as well as the weaklings who need "leadership",
are doing their best to fill in the gaps. The Hitlerian concept of
totality allows no room for difference; an official bread ration and
an official biochemistry are equally to be accepted by everyone; in
democracy Hitler finds a deplorable tendency to shrink from rationing
and to encourage deviations from the established principles of
biochemistry. This, he says, weakens the State; for one thing it leads
to endless discussion. (Hitler is an orator, not a debater; dislike of
letting other people talk is natural; his passion for action on a
world-scale, immense in space, enduring for all time, has the same
terrific concentration on himself.) Hitler's admirers in a democracy
take this up with considerable pleasure; in each of his victories they
see an argument against the Bill of Rights. Then war comes; sugar is
wanting and we accept a ration card; supreme commands are established
in various fields; and the sentiment spreads that "we can only beat
Hitler by becoming a 'total' State". (No one dares say "Nazi".)
Hitler, discerning in us a toleration of dissent, has driven hard into
every crevice, trying to split us apart, like cannel coal. He has
tried to turn dissent into disunion--and he has been helped by some of
the most loyal and patriotic Americans almost as much as he has been
helped by bundists.
We have not known how to deal with dissent; we stopped looking for the
causes of disagreement; even when war came, we confused the areas of
human action in which difference is vital with the areas in which
difference is a mortal danger.
The moment we saw the direction of Hitler's drive, which was to
magnify our differences, we began to encourage him by actively
intensifying all our disagreements; the greater our danger, the more
we were at odds. The results were serious enough.
No policy governing production had been accepted by industry;
No policy governing labor relations had been put into practise so that
it was operating smoothly;
No great stock of vital raw materials was laid up;
No great stock of vital war machinery had been created;
No keen awareness of the significance of the war had become an
integrated part of American thought;
No awareness of all the possibilities of attack had become an
integrated part of military and naval thought.
To this pitch of unreadiness the technique of "divide and disturb" had
brought us--but it had, none the less, failed. For the purpose of
disruption in America was to paralyze our will, to prevent us from
entering the war, to create a dangerous internal front if we did enter
the war.
What we proved was this: dissent is not a symptom of weakness, it is a
source of strength. It is the counterpart of the great scientific
methods of exploration, comparison, proof. Our dissents mean that we
continue to search; they mean that we do not rule out improvement
after we have accepted a machine or a method. (We carried this
"dissent" to an extreme in "yearly models" of motor cars and almost
daily models of lipstick; but we did manufacture in quantity, and the
error of _change before production_ which stalled our aircraft program
of 1917 was not repeated.)
_Why We Can't Use Hitler_
If we "need a Hitler" to defeat Hitler, we are lost, at this moment,
irretrievably, because the _final_ triumph of Hitlerism is to make us
need Hitler. The truth is we cannot use a Hitler, we cannot use
fascism, we cannot use any form of "total" organization except in the
one field where totality has always existed, which is war. So far as
war touches the composition of women's stockings or children's
ice-cream sodas, we need unified organization in the domestic field;
but not "total government". We have to be told (since it is not a
matter of individual taste) how many flavors of ice-cream may be
manufactured; but the regimentation of people is not required. (The
United States Army has officially declared against complete
regimentation in one of its own fields; every soldier studies the
history of this war and is encouraged to ask questions about it,
because "the War Department considers that every American soldier
should know clearly why and for what we are fighting.")
We cannot use a Hitler because we lack the time. We cannot catch up
with Hitler on Hitlerism. We cannot wait ten years to re-condition the
people of America, the ten vital years which Hitler spent enslaving
the German mind were spent by us in digging the American people out
from the ruined economic system which collapsed on them in 1929. We
are conditioned by the angry and excited controversy over the New
Deal; we are opinionated, variant, prejudiced, individual,
argumentative. We cannot be changed over to the German model. Perhaps
in a quieter moment we could be captivated (if not captured) by an
American-type dictator, a Huey Long; in wartime, when people undergo
incalculable changes of habit without a murmur, the old framework and
the established forms of life must be scrupulously revered. Otherwise
people will be scared; they will not respond to encouragement. That is
why we cannot take time to learn how to love a dictator.
The alternative is obvious: to re-discover the virtue which Hitler
calls a vice, to defeat totality by variety (which is the essential
substance of unity). I do not mean five admirals disputing command of
one fleet or one assembly line ordered to make three wholly different
aeroplane engines. I mean the combination of elements, as they are
combined in the food we eat and the water we drink; and as they are
combined in the people we are.
We have lived by combining a variety of elements; we have always
allowed as much freedom to variety as we could, believing that out of
this freedom would come a steady progress, a definite betterment of
our State; so, we have been taught, the human race has progressed, not
by utter uniformity, and not by anarchy, but by an alternation of two
things--the standard and the variant.
Now we face death--called totality. For us it is death; and we can not
avoid it by taking it in homeopathic doses, we can only live by
destroying whatever is deadly to us.
It is hard for a layman to translate the "strategy of variety" into
terms of production or naval movement. The translation is being made
every day by men in the factories and in the field; instinctively they
follow the technique of variety because it is natural to them. All the
layman can do is to watch and make sure that out of panic we do not
betray ourselves to the enemy.
It is not a matter of military technique, but of common sense that we
can only destroy our enemy out of our strength, striking at his
weakness; we can never defeat him by striking with our weakest arm
against his strongest. And our strong point is the variety, the
freedom, the independence of our thought and action. Hitler calls all
this a weakness, because he has destroyed it in his own country; and
so gives us the clue to his own weak spot.
_Has Hitler a Weakness?_
In the face of the stupendous victories of Germany, it is hard to say
that Hitler's army has a weak spot; but it did not take London or
Moscow in its first attempts, nor Suez. Somewhere in this formidable
strength a weakness is to be discovered; it will not be discovered by
us if we are intimidated into imitation. We have to be flexible,
feeling out our adversary, falling back when we have to, lunging
forward in another place or on another level; for this war is being
fought on several planes at once, and if we are not strong enough
today on one, we can fight on another; we are, in fact, fighting
steadily on the production front, intermittently on the V (or
foreign-propaganda) front, on the front of domestic stability, on the
financial front (in connection with the United Nations); and the war
front itself is divided into military and naval (with air in each) and
transport; our opportunity is to win by creating our own most
effective front, and keep hammering on it while we get ready to fight
on the ones our enemies have chosen.
Every soldier feels the difference between his own army and any other;
every general or statesman knows that the kind of war a nation fights
rises out of the kind of nation it is. This is the form of strategy
which the layman has to understand--in self-defense against the
petrified mind which either will not change the methods of the last
war, or will scrap everything in order to imitate the enemy. The
layman knows something of warfare now, because the layman is in it. He
knows that the tank and the Stuka and the parachute troop were
separate alien inventions combined by the German High Command; but
combinations of various arms is not an exclusively German conception.
The new concept in this war is ten years old, it is the sacrifice of a
nation to its army, the creation of mass-munitions, the concentration
on offensive striking power. All of these are successful against
broken and betrayed armies in France, against small armies unsupported
by tanks and planes; they are not entirely successful against huge
armies, fighting under trusted leaders, for a civilization they love,
an army of individual heroes, supported by guerillas on one side, and
an incalculable production power on the other. Possibly the Soviet
Union has discovered one weakness in the German war-strategy; it may
not be the weakness through which we can strike; we may have to find
another. We have to find the weakness of Japan, too--and we are not so
inclined to imitate them.
There is a famous picture of Winston Churchill, hatless in the street,
with a napkin in his hand, looking up at the sky; it was in Antwerp in
1914 and Churchill had left his dinner to see enemy aircraft in the
sky--an omen of things to come. At Antwerp Churchill had tried to head
off the German swing to the sea, but Antwerp was a defeat and
Churchill returned to London, still looking for some way to refuse the
German system of the trench, the bombardment, and the breakthrough. He
tried it with the tank; he tried it at Gallipoli; finally the Allies
tried it, half-heartedly, at Salonika. The war, on Germany's terms,
was a stalemate and Germany might have broken through; the war ended
because the balance was dislocated when America came in and,
simultaneously, both England and America began to fight the war also
on the propaganda level. By that time Churchill was "discredited"; he
had tried to shorten the war by two years and the British forces, with
success in their hands, had failed to strike home, failed to send the
one more battleship, the one more division which would have insured
victory--because Kitchener and the War Office and the French High
Command wanted to keep on fighting the war in the German way.
_Escape from Despair_
The desperation which overcomes the inexpert civilian at the thought
of fighting the military machines of Germany and Japan is justified
_only_ if we propose to fight them on their terms, in the way they
propose to us. Analogies are dangerous, but there is a sense in which
war is a chess game (as chess is a war game). White opens with Queen's
pawn to Qu 3, and Black recognizes the gambit. He can accept or
decline. If he accepts, it is because he thinks he can fight well on
that basis, but Black can also reject White's plan of campaign. The
good player is one who can break out of the strategy which the other
tries to impose.
We have felt ourselves incapable of fighting Hitler because we hate
Hitlerism and we do not want to think as he does, feel as he does, act
as he does--with more horror, more cruelty, more debasement of
humanity, in order to defeat him. And the public statements of our
leaders have necessarily concealed any new plan of attack; in fact we
have heard chiefly of super-fascist production, implying our
acceptance of the fascist tactics in the field; the best we can expect
is that soon we, not they, will take the offensive. If this were all,
it would still leave us fighting the fascist war.
The civilian's totally untrained dislike of this prospect is of
considerable importance because it is a parallel to the citizen's
authoritative and decisive objection to the Hitlerian strategy of
propaganda; and if the civilian holds out, if he discovers our native
natural strategy of civil action in the war, the army will be
constantly recruiting anti-fascists, will live in an atmosphere of
inventive anti-fascism, and therefore will never completely fall under
the spell of the enemy's tactics. That is why it is important for the
citizen to know that he is right. _We do not have to fight Hitler in
his way_; that is what Hitler wants us to do, because _if we do we can
not win_. There is another way--although we may not have found it yet.
In its celebrated "orientation course" the United States army explains
the strategy of the war to every one of its soldiers, not to make them
strategists, but to make them better soldiers. The civilian needs at
least as much knowledge so that he is not over-elated by a stroke of
luck or too cast down by disaster. The jokes about amateur strategists
and the High Command's justifiable resentment of ignorant criticism
are both beside the point; civilians do not need text books on
tactics; they need to know the nature of warfare. They needed
desperately to know in February, 1942, why General MacArthur was
performing a useful function in Bataan and why bombers were not sent
to his aid; and this information came to them from the President. But
the President is not the only one who can tell civilians how long it
takes to transport a division and put it into action; how air and sea
power interact; what a beach action involves; and a few other facts
which would allay impatience and give the worker in the factory some
sense of the importance of his work. The civilian in war work or out
of it should know something about war, and in particular he should
know that there are several kinds of war, one of which is correct and
appropriate and effective for us.
_Military Mummery_
It might be a good thing if some of the mumbo-jumbo about military
strategy were reduced to simple terms, so that the civilians, whose
lives and fortunes and sacred honor are involved, would know what is
happening to them. The military mind, aided by the military expert,
loves to use special terms; until recently the commentator on strategy
was as obscure and difficult as a music critic, and despatches from
the field as obscure as prescriptions in Latin. It is supposed that
doctors wrote in Latin not only because it was an exact and universal
language, but because it was not understood by laymen, so it gave
mystery and authority to their prescriptions. Latin is still not
understood, but the simple art of advertising has destroyed a vast
amount of business for the doctors because ads in English persuaded
the ignorant to use quack remedies and patent and proprietary
medicines, without consulting the doctor.
A rebellion like this against the military mind may occur; experts are
now writing for the popular press, and talking in elementary terms to
millions by radio. They cannot teach the techniques of correlated tank
and air attack any more than music critics can teach the creation of
head tones. But they can expound the fundamentals--and so expose the
military leadership to the _criticism it desperately needs_ if it is
to function properly. The essentials of warfare are dreadfully
simple--the production manager of any great industrial concern deals
with most of them every day. You have to get materials and equipment;
train men to use certain tools and instruments; bring power to bear at
chosen points, in sufficient quantity, at the right time, for the
right length of time; you have to combine the various kinds of force
at your disposal, and arrange a schedule, as there is a schedule for
chassis and body work in a motor car factory, so that the right
chassis is in the right place as its body is lowered upon it; you have
to stop or go on, according to judgments based on information. The
terrifying decisions, the choice of place and time, the selection of
instruments, the allocation of power to several points, are made by
the high command on the grand scale or by a sergeant if his officer is
shot down; and the right judgments distinguish the great commander or
the good platoon leader from the second rate. The civilian, without
information, cannot decide what to do; but, as Britain's _civilian_
courts of inquiry have shown, he can tell whether the right decisions
have been made. He can tell as well as the greatest commander, that
indecision and dispersion of forces made success at the Dardanelles
impossible in 1916; or that lack of a unified plan of tank attack made
the wreck of France certain in 1940. The civilian American who has
taken a hundred detours on motor roads can understand even the purely
military elements of a flanking movement; the industrial American need
not be baffled by the problems of fire-power, coordination, or supply.
We can understand the war if the mystery is stripped away, and if we
are allowed to understand that the wrong strategy is as fatal to us as
the wrong prescription.
I believe that we will have to strip the false front from
international diplomacy, from warfare, from all the inherited
"mysteries" which are still pre-Revolutionary in essence. We will have
to bring these things up to date because our lives depend on them, we
can no longer depend on the strategy of Gustavus Adolphus or the
diplomacy of Metternich. Five million soldiers in khaki, with a
nation's life disrupted for their support, require a different
strategy from that of Burgoyne's hired Hessians; and a hundred and
thirty million individuals simply do not want the intrigue and
Congress-dances diplomacy which traded territory, set up kings, and
found pretexts for good wars.
We have destroyed a good deal of the mummery of economics--not without
help; politics has become more familiar to us, we now know that a
thief in office is a thief, that tariffs are not made by abstract
thinkers, but by manufacturers and farmers and factory workers; we
know, with some poignancy, that taxes are paid by people like
ourselves and we are beginning to know that taxes are spent to keep
people alive and healthy and in jobs and, to a minute extent, also to
keep people cheerful, their minds alert, their spirits buoyant. The
very fact that we are now _all_ critics of spending is a great
advance, because it means we are all paying; when we are all critics
of foreign policy it will mean that we are all signing contracts with
other nations; and when we are all critics of war, it will mean that
we are all fighting.
As a student, I know what a layman can know about strategy; less about
tactics; as a citizen I should be of greater service to my country if
I knew more. What I have learned, from many sources, seems to hold
together and to demonstrate one thing: behind strategy in the field is
a strategy of a people in action; and victory comes to the leaders who
organize and use the national forces in keeping with the national
character.
I have gone to several authorities to discover whether the "tactics of
variety" (a "natural" in propaganda) has any counterpart in the field.
I cannot pretend that it is an accepted idea; it is hardly more than a
name for an attitude of mind; but I did find authority for the feeling
that an American (or United Nations) strategy need not be--and must
not be--the strategy of Hitler. So much the civilian can take to his
bosom, for comfort.
_A Variety of Strategies_
The greatest comfort to myself was in a little book published just in
time to corroborate a few guesses and immensely to widen my outlook;
it is called _Grand Strategy_; the authors are H.A. Sargeaunt, a
specialist in poison gas and tank design, a scientist and historian;
and Geoffrey West, biographer and student of politics; both British.
Although there are some difficult pages and some odd conclusions, this
book is a revelation--particularly it shows the connection between war
and the social conditions of nations making war; in the authors' own
words, "war and society condition each other"; they connect war with
progress and show how each nation can develop a strategy out of its
own resources. The hint we all got at school, that the French
revolution is responsible for vast civilian armies, is carried into a
history of the nineteenth century--and into this war.
The authors have their own names for each kind of war--each is a
"solution" to the problem of victory. Each adds a special factor to
the body of strategy known at the time, and this added special factor
rises from the country which uses it--from its methods of production,
its education, its religion, its banking and commercial habits, and
its whole social organization. Napoleon's solution was based on the
revolutionary enthusiasm of the French people; he added zeal, the
intense application of force, speed of movement, repeated hammering,
throwing in reserves. All of these things demand devotion, patriotic
self-sacrifice, and these qualities had been created, for the French,
by the Republic; they were not qualities known to the mercenaries and
small standing armies of Napoleon's enemies.
Against Napoleon's total use of the strategy of force, the British
opposed a strength based on the way they lived; it was a sea-strength
of blockade, but also on land they refused to accept the challenge of
Napoleon. They would not come out (until they were ready at Waterloo)
and let Napoleon find their weak spot for the exercise of his force.
Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, but the turning point came
years earlier at Torres Vedras in Spain; as Napoleon increased force,
Wellington increased "persistence"; it is called the "strategy of
attrition" and it means that Wellington's "aim was to wear down the
enemy troops by inducing them to attack [where Wellington] could
withdraw to take up positions and fight again."
Today, getting news of a campaign like Wellington's in Spain, the
average man would repeatedly read and hear headlines of retreat; he
would get the impression of an uninterrupted series of defeats. But
the Peninsular War was actually a triumph for British arms. It was a
triumph because Wellington refused to fight in any way not natural to
the British; his masterly retreats did not disturb the "inborn
toughness and phlegm, that saving lack of imagination" which makes the
British, as these British authors say, "good at retreats". Moreover,
this war of slow retreats gave Britain time to develop a tremendous
manufacturing power, to organize the blockade of Napoleon and the
merchant fleet for supply to Spain. The whole history of modern
England, its acceptance of the factory system, its naval supremacy,
its relation to the Continent, and its internal reforms--all rise from
the kind of war Wellington made, and the kind he refused to make.
For the curious, the later "solutions" are: under Bismark and Moltke,
increased training and use of equipment and material resources; under
Hitler, "synchronized timing" (connected with air-power and the
impossibility of large-scale surprise; also connected with "alertness
and intelligence" in the individual soldier, a frightening development
under a totalitarian military dictatorship); and finally, under
Churchill, "the national sandbag defense", increasing "usable morale
and initiative". Sandbag defense gets its name from the battle of
London; but it refers to all sorts of defensive operations--a bullet
is shot into sand and the dislodged grains of sand form themselves
again so that the next bullet has the same depth of sand to go
through--unless the bullets come so fast in "synchronized timing" or
blitzkrieg that the sand hasn't time to close over the gap again. The
defense "demands that every person in the nation be capable of
sticking to his task even without detailed orders from others,
regardless of the odds against him and though it may mean certain
death. _Every_ person--not merely the trained minority. This happened
at Dunkirk...." At Dunkirk the grains of sand were hundreds of small
yachts, motor boats, trawlers, coasting vessels, many of which were
taken to the dreadful beach by civilians virtually without orders;
some of them became ferry-boats, taking men off the shore to the
transports which could not get close enough, going back and forth,
without stop--the grains of sand reforming until an army was rescued.
These examples drive home the principle that a form or style of
warfare must be found by each nation corresponding to the state of the
nation _at that time_; the "psychology" of the nation may remain
constant for a century, but the way to make war will change if the
methods of production have changed. If the nation has lost (or won)
colonies, if education has reached the poor, if child labor has ended
(so that youths of eighteen are strong enough for tank duty), if women
are without civil rights, if a wave of irreligion or political
illiberality has swept over the country--if any vital change has
occurred, the style of war must change also. Every social change
affects the kind of war we can fight, the kind we must discover for
ourselves if we are to defeat an enemy who has chosen his style and is
trying to impose it on us. The analysis of Hitler's war-style must be
left to experts; if its essence is "synchronized timing", our duty is
to find a way of upsetting the time-table, not only by months, but by
minutes. Possibly the style developed by Stalin can do both--by
pulling back into the vast spaces of Russia, Stalin created a
battlefield without shape or definition, which may have prevented the
correlation of the parts of Hitler's armies; by encouraging guerillas,
he may have upset the timing of individual soldiers, tanks, and
planes. The success of the Eighth Route Army in China was based on a
totally different military style, the only completely Communist style
on record; for the army was successful because it built a Communist
society on the march, actually and literally, establishing schools,
manufacturing arms, bearing children, and fighting battles at the same
time, so that at the end of several years the army had extricated
itself from a trap, crossed and recrossed miles of enemy territory,
reformed itself with more men and arms than it had at the
beginning--and had operated as a center of living civilization for
hundreds of thousands.
The operations of Chiang Kai Chek against the Japanese are another
example of rejecting the enemy's style; over the enormous terrain of
China, the defending armies could scatter and hide from aircraft; the
cities fell or were gutted by fire; but the people moved around them,
the armies remained. Japan's attack on Britain and ourselves began
with islands, where the lesson of China could not be applied; and the
islands were dependencies, not free nations like China, so the
psychology of defense was also different; in the opening phases there
was no choice and the Japanese forced us to accept their way of making
war. Their way, it appears, is appropriate to their beliefs, their
requirements in food, their capacity to imitate Europe, and dozens of
other factors, not precisely similar to ours. Their experience and
outlook in life and ideas of honor may lead to the suicide bomber;
ours do not. Our dive bombers feel no shame if they miss a target;
they have a duty which is to save their ships and return for another
try; it is against the whole natural tradition of the west that a man
should kill himself for the honor of a ruler; we would not send out an
army with orders to gain honor by death, as we prefer to gain honor by
victory. So in the true sense it would be suicidal for us to imitate
the Japanese; our heroism-to-the-death is the arrival, at the final
moment, of a last reserve of courage and devotion; it is not a planned
bravery, nor a communal devotion, it is as private as liberty--or
death.
Our heroism rises out of our lives. Our science of victory will have
to be based on our lives, too, on the way we manufacture, play games,
read newspapers, eat and drink and bring up children. It is the
function of our high command to translate what we can do best into a
practical military strategy. The civilian's function is to provide the
physical and moral strength needed to support the forces in the field.
Here the civilian is qualified to make certain demands, because we
know where our intellectual and moral strength lies; we can work to
keep the tactics of variety operative in the field of public emotion.
The next two chapters are a translation of the tactics of variety into
terms of propaganda and its objective, which is unity of action.
CHAPTER III
United...?
When I began to write this book the unity "made in Japan" was
beginning to wear thin; when I finished people were slowly accustoming
themselves to a new question: they did not know whether an illusion of
unity was better than no unity at all.
We know now that we were galvanized into common action by the shock of
attack; but to recoil from a blow, to huddle together for
self-protection, to cry for revenge--are not the signs of a national
unity. Before the war was three months old it was clear that we were
not united on any question; while we all intended to win the war, the
new appeasers had arrived--who wanted to buy themselves off the
consequences of war by not fighting it boldly; or by fighting only
Japan; or fighting Japan only at Hawaii; we disagreed about the
methods of warfare and the purpose of victory; there were those who
wanted the war won without aid from liberals and those who would
rather the war were lost than have labor contribute to victory; and
those who seemed more interested in preventing profit than in creating
munitions; it was a great chance "to put something over"--possibly the
radicals could be destroyed, possibly the rich; possibly the President
or his wife could be trapped into an error, possibly a sales tax would
prevent a new levy on corporations, possibly labor could maneuvre
itself into dominance; the requirements of war could be a good excuse
for postponing all new social legislation and slily dropping some of
the less vital projects; and the inescapable regimentation of millions
of people, the necessary propaganda among others, could be used as an
opportunity for new social experiments and indoctrination. In these
differences and in the bitterness of personal dislike, people
believed that the war could not be won unless their separate purposes
were also fulfilled; our activities were not designed to fit with one
another, and we were like ionized particles, held within a framework,
but each pulling away from the others.
The attack on Pearl Harbor silenced the pacifists; not even the most
misguided could suggest that the President had maneuvred Japan into
the attack; the direct cause of the war, including the war which Italy
and Germany declared on us, was self-protection. We were not fighting
for England, for the Jews, for the munition makers. But did we know
what we _were_ fighting for? The President had said that we did not
intend to be constantly at the mercy of aggressors; and the Atlantic
Charter provided a rough sketch of the future. But we did not know
whether we were to be allied with Britain, reconstruct Europe, raise
China to dominance in the Far East, enter a supernational system,
withdraw as we did at the end of the last war, or simply make
ourselves the rulers of the world.
Matching our casual uncertainty was the dead-shot clear-minded
intention of our enemies--to conquer, to subjugate, to rule; by
forgetting all other aims, eliminating all private purposes; by
putting aside whatever the war did not require and omitting nothing
necessary for victory; by making war itself the great social
experiment, using war to destroy morals, habits and enterprises which
did not help the war, destroying, above all, the prejudices, the
rights, the character of civilized humanity as we have known them.
Have we a source of unity which can oppose this totality? According to
Hitler, we have not: we are a nation of many races and people; we are
a capitalist country divided between the rich and the poor; we break
into political parties; we reject leadership; we are given up to
private satisfactions and do not understand the sacrifices which unity
demands.
Therefore, in the Hitlerian prophecy, America needs only to be put
under the slightest tension and it will fall apart.
The strains under which people live account for their strength as well
as their weakness; we are strong in another direction precisely
because we are not "unified" in the Nazi sense. Actually the Nazis
have no conception of unity; their purpose is totality, which is not
the same thing at all. A picture or a motor has unity when all the
_different_ parts are arranged and combined to produce a specific
effect; but a canvas all painted the same shade of blue has no
unity--it is a totality, a total blank; there is no unity in a
thousand ball-bearings; they are _totally_ alike.
If the Nazi argument is not valid, why did we first thank Japan for
unity, and then discover that we had no unity? Why were we pulling
against one another, so that in the first year of the war we were
distracted and ineffective, as France had been? If outright pacifism
was our only disruptive element, why didn't we, after we were
attacked, embrace one another in mutual forgiveness, high devotion to
our country, and complete harmony of purpose? Months of disaster in
the Pacific and the grinding process of reorganizing for production at
home left us unaware of the sacrifices we had still to make, and at
the mercy of demagogues waiting only for the right moment to start a
new appeasement. Perhaps next summer, when the American people won't
get their motor trips to the mountains and the lakes; perhaps next
winter when coal and oil may not be delivered promptly; perhaps when
the first casualty lists come in....
We were not a united people and were not mature enough, in war years,
to face our disunion. When we become mature we will discover that
unity means agreement as to purpose, consent as to methods, and
willingness to function. All the parts of the motor car have to do
their work, or the car will not run well; that is their unity; and our
unity will bring every one of us jobs to do for which we have to
prepare. We can remember Pearl Harbor with banners and diamond clasps,
but until we forget Pearl Harbor and do the work which national unity
requires of us, we will still be children playing a war game--and
still persuading ourselves that we can't lose.
_The Background of Disunion_
In the urgency of the moment no one asked how it happened that the
United States were not a united people. No one wondered what had
happened to us in the past twenty years to make religious and racial
animosities, political heresy-hunts, and class hatreds so common that
they were used not only by demagogues, but by men responsible to the
nation. No one asked whether the unity we had always assumed was ever
a real thing, not a politician's device, for use on national holidays
only. And, when the disunion of the people's leaders began to be
apparent, and the people began to be ill-at-ease--then they were told
to remember Pearl Harbor, or that we were all united really, but were
helping our country best by constructive criticism. The fatal
circumstance of our disunity we dared not face. No one who _could_
unite the people was willing to work out the basis of unity--and
everyone left it to the President, as if in the strain of battle, a
general were compelled to orate to the troops. The President's work
was to win over our enemies; it should not have been necessary for him
to win us over, too.
The situation is grave because we have no tradition of early defeat
and ultimate victory; we have no habit of national feeling, so that
when hardships fall on us we feel alone, and victimized. We do not
know what "all being in the same boat" really signifies; we will, of
course, pull together if we are shipwrecked; but the better way to win
wars is to avoid shipwrecks, not to survive them.
We cannot improvise a national unity; we can only capitalize on gusts
of anger or jubilation, from day to day--these are the tactics of war
propaganda, not its grand strategy. For our basic unity we have to go
where it already exists, we have to uncover a great mother-lode of
the true metal, where it has always been; we have to _remind_
ourselves of what we have been and are, so that our unity will come
from within ourselves, and not be plastered on like a false front. For
it is only the strength inside us that will win the war and create a
livable world for us when we have won it.
We have this deep, internal, mother-lode of unity--in our history, our
character, and our destiny. We are awkward in approaching it, because
in the past generation we have falsified our history and corrupted our
character; the men now in training camps grew up between the Treaty of
Versailles and the crash of 1929; they lived in the atmosphere of
normalcy and debunking; of the Ku Klux Klan and Bolshevism; of boom
and charity; and it is not surprising that they were, at first,
bewildered by the sudden demands on their patriotism.
_Losing a Generation_
We have to look into those twenty years before we can create an
effective national unity; what we find there is a disaster--but facing
it is a tonic to the nerves.
What happened was this: for the first time since the Civil War,
progressivism--our basic habit of mind--disappeared from effective
politics. The moral fervor of the Abolitionists, the agrarian anger of
the Populists, the evangelical fervor of William J. Bryan, the
impulsive almost boyish Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt, the
studious reformism of Woodrow Wilson, all form a continuity of
political idealism; from 1856 to 1920 a party, usually out of office,
was bringing the fervor and passion of moral righteousness into
politics. The passion was defeated, but the political value of
fighting for morally desirable ends remained high; and in the end the
wildest demands of the "anarchists" and enemies of the Republic were
satisfied by Congresses under Roosevelt and Wilson and Taft.
This constant battle for progressive principles is one of the most
significant elements in American life--and we have unduly neglected
it. James Bryce once wrote that there was no basic difference in the
philosophy of Democrats and Republicans, and thousands of teachers
have repeated it to millions of children; intellectuals have neglected
politics because the corruption of local battles has left little to
choose between the Vare machine in Philadelphia, the Kelly in Chicago,
the Long in Louisiana. For many years, in the general rise of our
national wealth, politics seemed relatively unimportant and "vulgar";
and the figure of the idealist and social reformer was always
ludicrous, because the reformers almost always came from the land,
from the midwest, from the heart of America, not from its centers of
financial power and social graces.
So constant--and so critical--is the continuity of reformist politics
in America, that the break, in 1920, becomes an event of extreme
significance--a symptom to be watched, analysed and compared. Why did
America suddenly break with its progressive tradition--and what was
the result?
The break occurred because the reformist, comparatively radical party
was in power in 1918 when the war ended; all radicalism was
discredited by the rise of Bolshevism in Russia, with its implied
threat to the sanctity of property. Disappointment in the outcome of
the war, Wilson's maladroit handling of the League of Nations, and his
untimely illness, doomed the Democratic Party to impotence and the
Republicans to reaction, which is often worse. So there could be no
effective, respectable party agitating for reform, for a saner
distribution of the pleasures and burdens of citizenship; in the years
that followed, certain social gains were kept, some laws were passed
by the momentum gained in the past generation, but the characteristic
events were the Ohio scandals, the lowering of income taxes in the
highest brackets, the failure of the Child Labor Amendment, and the
heartfelt, complete abandonment of America to normalcy--a condition
totally abnormal in American history.
It is interesting to note that the only reformer of this period was
the prohibitionist; the word changed meaning; a derisive echo clings
to it still. The New Deal hardly ever used the word; and the reformers
of the New Deal were called revolutionists because reform was no
longer in the common language--or perhaps because reforms delayed
_are_ revolutionary when they come.
The disappearance of liberalism as an active political force left a
vacuum; into it came, triumphantly, the wholly un-American normalcy of
Harding and Coolidge and, in opposition, the wholly un-American
radicalism of the Marxists; the Republicans gave us our first touch of
true plutocracy and the Reds our most effective outburst of debunking.
Between them they almost ruined the character of an entire generation.
For 150 years the United States had tried to do two things: first,
allow as many people as possible to make as much money as possible and,
second, prevent the rich from acquiring complete control of the
Government. As each new source of power grew, the attempt to limit kept
pace with it; under Jackson, it was the banking power that had to be
broken; under Lincoln the manufacturing power was somewhat balanced if
not checked by the grant of free land; the Interstate Commerce
Commission regulated rates and reduced the power of the railroads; the
Sherman Act, relatively ineffective, was directed against trusts;
changes in tariff laws occasionally gave relief to the victims of
"infant industries". Under Theodore Roosevelt the railroads and the
coal mine owners were held back and a beginning made in the recognition
of organized labor; under Wilson the financial power was seriously
compromised by the Federal Reserve Act, and industrial-financial power
was balanced, a little, by special legislation for rural banking; under
Taft the Income Tax Amendment was passed and an effort made to deduct
from great fortunes a part of the cost of the Government which
protected those fortunes.
_Robbers and Pharisees_
The era of normalcy was unique in one thing, it made the encouragement
and protection of great fortunes the first concern of Government.
Nothing else counted. Through its executives and administrators,
through cabinet members and those closest to the White House, normalcy
first declared that no moral standard, no patriotism, no respect for
the dead, should stand in the way of robbing the people of the United
States; and so cynically did the rulers of America steal the public
funds, that the people returned them to power with hardly a reproach.
The rectitude of Calvin Coolidge made his party respectable; his dry
worship of the money power was as complete a betrayal as Harding's. He
spoke the dialect of the New England rustic, but he was false to the
economy and to the idealism of New England; his whole career was an
encouragement to extravagance; he was ignorant or misled or
indifferent, for he watched a spiral of inflated values and a fury of
gambling, and helped it along; he refused even to admonish the people,
although he knew that the mania for speculation was drawing the
strength of the country away from its functions. Money was being
made--and he respected money; money in large enough quantities could
do no harm. Even after the crash, he could not believe that money had
erred. When he was asked to write a daily paragraph of comment on the
state of the nation, he was embarrassed; he had been the President of
prosperity and he did not want to face a long depression; he asked his
friends at Morgan and Company to advise him and they told him that the
depression would be over almost immediately, so he began his writings,
admitting that "the condition of the country is not good"; but the
depression outlasted his writing and his life. By the usual process of
immediate history, this singularly loquacious, narrow-minded,
ignorant, and financially destructive President stands in public
memory as the typical laconic Yankee who preached thrift and probably
would have prevented the depression if we had followed his advice.
His successor was a reformed idealist. He had fed the Belgians, looked
after the commercial interests of American businessmen, and promised
two cars in every American garage. At last plutocracy was to pay off
in comfort--but it was too late. Not enough Americans had garages, not
enough cars could be bought by the speculators on Wall Street, to make
up for the lack of sales among the disinherited.
_No More Ideals_
Normalcy was a debasement of the normal instincts of the average
American; it deprived us of political morality, not only because it
began in corruption, but because it ended with indifference; normalcy
destroyed idealism, particularly the simple faith in ideals of the
common man, the somewhat uncritical belief that one ought "to have
ideals" which intellectuals find so absurd.
In the attack on American idealism, our relations with Europe changed
and this reacted corrosively on the great foundations of American
life, on freedom of conscience and freedom of worship, on the
political equality of man. By the anti-American policy of Harding and
Coolidge we lost the great opportunity of resuming communication with
Europe; a generation grew up not only hostile to the nations of Europe
("quarrelsome defaulters" who "hired the money") but suspicious of
Europeans who had become Americans. The Ku Klux Klan, Ford's and
Coughlin's attacks on the Jews, Pelley's attacks on the Jews and the
Catholics, and a hundred others--were reflections in domestic life of
our withdrawal from foreign affairs.
_Left Deviation_
Parallel to normalcy ran the stream of radicalism, its enemy. Broken
from political moorings by the collapse of Wilsonian democracy,
progressives and liberals drifted to the left and presently a line was
thrown to them from the only established haven of radicalism
functioning in the world: Moscow. Not all American liberals tied
themselves to the party line; but few found any other attachment. The
Progressive Party of LaFollette vanished; the liberal intellectuals
were unable to work into the Democratic Party; and, in fact, when
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected and called his election a
victory for liberals, no one was more impressed than the liberals
themselves. That the new President was soon to appear as a
revolutionary radical was unthinkable.
What had happened to the constant American liberal tradition? What had
rendered sterile the ancient fruitful heritage of American radicalism?
The apoplectic committees investigating Bolshevism cried aloud that
Moscow gold had bought out the American intellectuals, which was a
silly lie; but why was Moscow gold more potent than American gold, of
which much more was available? (American gold, it turned out, was busy
trying to subsidize college professors and ministers of God, to
propagandize against public ownership of public utilities.)
It was not the gold of Moscow, but the iron determination of Lenin
that captivated the American radical. At home the last trace of
idealism was being destroyed and in Russia a new world was being
created with all the harshness and elation of a revolutionary action.
The direction in America was, officially, _back_ (to normalcy; against
the American pioneering tradition of forward movement); the direction
of Russia was forward--to the unknown.
Few reached Moscow; few were acceptable to the stern hierarchy of
Communism; but all American liberal intellectuals were drawn out of
their natural orbit by the attraction of the new economic planet. Most
of them remained suspended between the two worlds--and in that unhappy
state they tried to solace their homelessness by jeering at their
homeland.
The American radical's turn against America was a new thing, as new as
the normalcy which provoked it. In the 19th century a few painters and
poets had fled from America; the politicians and critics stayed home,
to fight. They fought for America, passionately convinced that it was
worth fighting for. The Populists and later the muck-rakers and
finally the Progressives were violent, opinionated, cross-grained and
their "lunatic fringe" was dangerous, but none of them despised
America; they despised only the betrayers of America: the railroads,
the bankers, the oil monopolies, the speculators in Wall Street, the
corrupt men in City Hall, the bribed men in Congress. It was not the
time for nice judgments, not the moment to distinguish between a
plunderer like Gould and a builder like Hill. What Rockefeller had
done to _save_ the oil industry wasn't seen until long after he had
destroyed a dozen competitors; what the trusts were doing to prepare
for large-scale production and mass-distribution wasn't to be
discovered until the trusts themselves were a memory.
So the radicals of 1880 and 1900 were unfair; they usually wanted easy
money in a country which was getting rich with hard money; they wanted
the farmer to rule as he had ruled in Jefferson's day, but they did
not want to give up the cotton gin and the machine loom and the reaper
and the railroads which were transferring power to the city and the
factory. The radical seemed often to be as selfish and greedy as the
fat Republicans who sat in Congress and in bankers' offices and
juggled rates of interest and passed tariffs to make industrial
infants fat also.
Yet the liberal-radical until 1920 was a man who loved America and
wanted only that America should fulfill its destiny, should be always
more American, giving our special quality of freedom and prosperity to
more and more men; whereas the radical-critic of the 1920's wept
because America was too American and wanted her to become as like
Europe as we could--and not a living Europe, of course. The Europe
held before America as an ideal in the 1920's was the Europe which
died in the first World War.
_Working Both Sides of the Street_
The radical attack on America completed the destruction begun by the
plutocrats; they played into each other's hands like crooked gamblers.
The plutocrat and the politician made patriotism sickening by using it
to blackjack those who saw skullduggery corrupting our country; and
the radical critic made patriotism ridiculous by belittling the
nation's past and denying its future. The politicians supported
committees to make lists of heretics, and tried to deny civil rights
to citizens in minority parties; and the intellectuals pretended that
the Ku Klux Klan was the true spirit of America; the plutocrats and
the politicians murdered Sacco and Vanzetti and the radicals acted as
if no man had ever suffered for his beliefs in France or England or
Germany or Spain. The debasement of American life was rapid and
ugly--and instead of fighting, the radical critic rejoiced, because he
did not care for the America that had been; it was not Communist and
not civilized in the European sense--why bother to save it?
In 1936 I summed up years of disagreement with the fashionable
attitude under the (borrowed) caption, _The Treason of the
Intellectuals_. Looking back at it now, I find a conspicuous error--I
failed to bracket the politician with the debunker, the plutocrat with
the radical. I was for the average man against both his enemies, but I
did not see how the reactionary and the radical were combining to
create a vacuum in American social and political life.
The people of the United States were--and are--"materialistic" and in
love with the things that money can buy; but the ascendancy of
speculative wealth in the 1920's was not altogether satisfying. More
people than ever before gambled in Wall Street; but considering the
stakes, the steady upswing of prices, the constant stories of success,
the open boasting of our great industrialists and the benign, tacit
assent of Calvin Coolidge--considering all these, the miracle is that
eight out of ten capable citizens did not speculate. The chance to
make money was part of the American tradition--for which millions of
Europeans had come to America; but it did not fulfill all the
requirements of a purpose in life. It wasn't good enough by any
standard; it allowed a class of disinherited to rise in America, a
fatal error because our wealth depended on customers and the penniless
are not good risks; and the riches-system could not protect itself
from external shock. Europe began to shiver with premonitions of
disaster, a bank in Austria fell, and America loyally responded with
the greatest panic in history.
Long before the money-ideal crashed, it had been rejected by some of
the American people. It would have been scorned by more if anything
else had been offered to them, anything remotely acceptable to them.
The longest tradition of American life was cooperative effort; the
great traditions of hardship and experiment and progressive liberalism
and the mingling of races and the creation of free communities--all
these were still in our blood. But when the plutocrat and politician
tried to destroy them by neglect or persecution, the intellectual did
not rebuild them; he told us that the traditions had always been a
false front for greed, and asked us to be content with laughing at the
past; or he told us that nothing was good in the future of the world
except the Russian version of Karl Marx.
_We L'arn the Furriner_
The crushing double-grip of the anti-Americans of the Right and Left
was most effective in foreign affairs. Normalcy wanted back the money
which Europe had hired, as President Coolidge said; and normalcy
wanted to hear nothing more of Europe. At the same time the radical
was basically internationalist; the true believer in Lenin was also
revolutionist. Sheer isolationism didn't work; we were constantly on
the side lines of the League of Nations; we stepped in to save Germany
and presumably to help all Europe; we trooped to the deathbed of old
Europe (with the exchange in our favor); the sickness made us uneasy
at last--but we could not break from isolation because normalcy and
radicalism together had destroyed the common, and acceptable, American
basis of friendly independent relations with Europe.
Internationalism, with a communistic tinge, was equally unthinkable;
and presently we began to think that a treaty of commerce might
somehow be "internationalist". Europe, meanwhile, broke into three
parts, fascist, communist, and the victims of both, the helpless ones
we called our friends, the "democracies". By 1932 economics had
destroyed isolation and Hitler began to destroy internationalism. The
American people had for twelve years shrunk from both, now found that
it had no shell to shrink into--America had repudiated all duty to the
world; it had tried to make the League of Nations unnecessary by a few
pacts and treaties; it had flared up over China and, rebuffed by
England, sunk back into apathy. It was uninformed, without habit or
tradition or will in foreign affairs; without any ideal around which
all the people of America could gather; and with nothing to do in the
world.
The New Deal repaired some of the destruction of normalcy, but it
could not allay the mischief and unite the country at the same time.
Loyalty to the Gold Standard and devotion to the principle of letting
people starve were both abandoned; the shaming moral weakness of the
Hoover regime, the resignation to defeat, were overcome. The direct
beneficiaries of the New Deal were comparatively few; the indirect
were the middle and upper income classes. They saw President Roosevelt
save them from a dizzy drop into revolution; a few years later the
danger was over, and when the rich and well-born saw that the
President was not going to turn conservative, they regretted being
saved--thinking that perhaps the revolution of 1933 might have turned
fascist, and in their favor.
These were extremists. The superior common man was not a reactionary
when he voted for Landon or Willkie. After the Blue Eagle was killed
by the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court was saved by resignations,
the average American could accept ninety percent of the objectives of
FDR--and ask only for superior efficiency from the Republican Party.
The newspapers of the country were violent; Martin Dies was violent;
John L. Lewis was violent; but labor and radicals and people were
_not_ violent. We were approaching some unity of belief in America's
national future when the war broke out.
_Quarterback vs. Pedagogue_
The New Deal had no visible foreign policy, but President Roosevelt
made up for it by having several, one developing out of the other,
each a natural consequence of events abroad in relation to the state
of public opinion at home. To a great extent this policy was based on
the President's dislike of tyranny and his love for the Navy, a
fortunate combination for the people of the United States, for it
allied us with the Atlantic democracies and compeled us to face the
prospect of war in the Pacific. So far as we were at all prepared to
defend ourselves, we are indebted to the President's recognition of
our position as a naval power requiring a friend at the farther end of
each ocean, Britain in the Atlantic, Russia and China in the Pacific.
The President's policy, singularly correct, was not the people's
policy. It was not part of the New Deal; it was not tied into domestic
policies; it subsisted in a dreadful void. Mr. Roosevelt, who once
called himself the nation's quarterback, never had the patient almost
pedantic desire to teach the American people which was so useful to
Wilson. The notes to Germany, scorned at the time, were an education
in international law for the American people; by 1917 the people were
aware of the war and beginning to discover a part in it for
themselves. Mr. Roosevelt's methods were more spectacular, but not as
patient, so that he sometimes alienated people, and he faced a wilier
enemy at home; Wilson overcame ignorance and Roosevelt had to overcome
deliberate malice, organized hostility to our system of government,
and a true pacificism which has always been native to America. Racial,
religious, and national prejudices were all practised upon to prevent
the creation of unity; it was not remarked at the time that class
prejudice did not arise.
The defect of Roosevelt's method led to this: the American people did
not understand their own position in the world. The President had
appealed to their moral sense when he asked for a quarantine of the
aggressors; he appealed to fear when he cited the distances between
Dakar and Des Moines; but he had no unified body of opinion behind
him. The Republican Party might easily have nominated an isolationist
as a matter of politics if not of principle; and it was a stroke of
luck that politics (not international principles) gave the opportunity
to Wendell Willkie. Yet the boldest move made by Mr. Roosevelt, the
exchange of destroyers for bases, had to be an accomplished fact, and
a good bargain, before it could be announced. Even Mr. Willkie's
refusal to play politics with the fate of Britain did not assure the
President of a country willing to understand its new dangers and its
new opportunities.
Nothing in the past twenty years had prepared America; and the
isolationists picked up the weapons of both the plutocrat and the
debunker to prevent our understanding our function in a fascist world.
The grossest appeal to self-interest and the most cynical imputation
of self-interest in others, went together. There were faithful
pacifists who disliked armaments and disliked the sale of armaments
even more; but there were also those who wanted the profit of selling
without the risk; there were the alarming fellow travelers who wished
America to be destroyed until they discovered the USSR wanted American
guns. There were snide businessmen who wanted Hitler even more than
they wanted peace, and a mob, united by nothing--except a passion for
the cruelty and the success of the Nazis.
The spectacle of America arguing war in 1941 was painful and ludicrous
and one sensed changes ahead; but it had one great redeeming quality,
it was in our tradition of public discussion and a vast deal of the
discussion was honest and fair.
The war did not change Americans over night. The argument had not
united us; but in the first days we dared not admit this; we began a
dangerous game of hypnotizing ourselves.
CHAPTER IV
"The Strategy of Truth"
The consequences of building on a unity which does not exist are
serious. We have discovered that all war is total war; we have also
found that while our enemies lie to us, they do not lie to their High
Commands.
Total war requires total effort from the civilian and we have assumed
that, in America, this means enthusiasm for our cause, understanding
of our danger, willingness to sacrifice, confidence in our leaders,
faith in ultimate victory. We may be wrong; total effort in Germany is
based more on compulsion and promise than on understanding. But we
cannot immediately alter the atmosphere in which we are living. If we
could, if our leaders believed that total effort could be achieved
more quickly by lies than by truth, it would be their obligation to
lie to us. In total war there is no alternative to the most effective
weapon. Only the weapon must be effective over a sufficient length of
time; the advantage of a lie must be measured against the loss when
the lie is shown up; if the balance is greater, over a period of time,
than the value of the truth, the lie still must be told. If we are a
people able to recognize a lie too fast for it to be effective, the
lie must not be used; if we react "correctly" to certain forms of
persuasion (as, say, magazine ads and radio commercials), the
psychological counterparts of these should be used, at least until a
new technique develops.
This is a basis for "the strategy of truth" which Archibald MacLeish
set in opposition to the Nazi "strategy of terror". The opposition is
not perfect because the Nazis have used the truth plentifully in
spreading terror, especially by the use of moving pictures. Their
strategy, ethically, is a mixture of truth and lies, in combination;
practically speaking, this strategy is on the highest ethical plane
because it saves Nazi lives, brings quick victory, protects the State
and the people. It is, however, ill-suited to our purposes.
_Ethics of Lying_
Mr. MacLeish is being an excellent propagandist in the very use of the
phrase, "strategy of truth", which corresponds to the President's
"solemn pact of truth between government and the people"; there are a
hundred psychological advantages in telling us that we are getting the
truth; but propaganda has no right to use the truth if the truth
ceases to be effective. Lies are easier to tell, but harder to handle;
in a democracy they are tricky and dangerous because the conditions
for making lies effective have not been created; such conditions were
created in Germany; they came easily in other countries where no
direct relations between people and government existed.
Before propaganda can lie to us, safely and for our own preservation,
honorably and desirably, it must persuade us to give up our whole
system of communication, our political habits, our tradition of free
criticism. This could be done; but it would be difficult; no
propagandist now working in America is cunning and brutal enough to
destroy our civil liberties without a struggle which would cost more
(in terms of united effort) than it would be worth. We cannot stop in
the middle of a war to break down one system of persuasion and create
another; the frame of mind which advertising men call "consumer
acceptance" is, as they know, induced by a touch of newness in a
familiar framework; the new element catches attention but it has to
become familiar before it is effective.
Our propagandists, therefore, must use the truth, as they incline to
do, but they have to learn its uses. We gain prestige by advertising
the truth, even though the use of truth is forced upon us; but we have
not yet won approval of the suppression of truth. It is good to use
truth as flattery ("You are brave enough to know the truth") but truth
also creates fear which (advertisers again know this) is a potent
incentive to action. Finally, the use of truth requires the
canalization of propaganda; it is too dangerous to be handled by
everyone.
The propagandists of our cause include everyone who speaks to the
people, sells a bond, writes, broadcasts, publishes, by executive
order or private will; they vary in skill and in detailed purpose;
they blurt out prejudices and conceal information useful to the
citizen. They have not, so far as any one has discovered, lied to the
people of America, contenting themselves at first with concealing the
extent, or belittling the significance, of our reverses; presently the
same sources began to abuse the American people for not being aware of
the danger threatening them; and no one officially recognized the
connection between ignorance and concealment.
_Maxims for Propagandists_
It is easy to mark down the detailed errors of propaganda. The more
difficult work is to create a positive program; and it is possible
that we have been going through an experimental period, while such a
program is being worked out in Washington. A few of the requirements
are obvious.
_Propaganda must be used._ Our government has no more right to deprive
us of propaganda than it has to deprive us of pursuit planes or
bombers or anti-aircraft guns or antitoxin. Propaganda is the great
offensive-defensive weapon of the home front; if we do not get it, we
should demand it. If what we get is defective, we should protest as we
would protest against defective bombsights.
_Propaganda must be organized._ Otherwise it becomes a diffused babel
of opinion.
_Propaganda must be unscrupulous._ It has one duty--to the State.
_Propaganda must not be confused with policy._ If at a given moment
the Grand Strategy of the war absolutely requires us to offer a
separate peace to Italy or to make war on Rumania, propaganda must
show this need in its happiest light; if the reverse is required,
propaganda's job does not alter. Policy should not be made by
propagandists and propagandists should have no policy.
_Propaganda must interact with policy._ If at a given moment, the
Grand Strategy has a free choice between recognizing or rejecting a
Danish Government-in-exile, the action which propaganda can use to
best advantage is the better.
_Propaganda must have continuity._ The general principles of
propaganda have to be worked out, and followed. The principle, in
regard to direct war news, may be to tell all, to tell nothing, or to
alter the dosage according to the temper of the people. The choice of
one of these principles is of the gravest importance; it must be done,
or approved, by the President. After the choice is made, sticking to
one principle is the only way to build confidence. Except for details
of naval losses, the British official announcements are prompt and
accurate; the British people generally do not go about in the fear of
hidden catastrophe. The Italian system differs and may be suited to
the temper of the people; the Russian communiques are exactly adapted
to Stalin's concept of the war: the Red soldier is cited for heroism,
in small actions, the Germans are always identified as fascists, the
vast actions of the entire front are passed over in a formal opening
sentence. The German method has its source in Hitler; the
announcements of action are rhetorical, contemptuous, and sometimes
threatening; the oratory which accompanies the official statements
has, for the first time, had a setback, since the destruction of the
Russian Army was announced in the autumn of 1941, but no one has
discovered any serious reaction as a result. The German people have
been conditioned by action; and action has worked with propaganda for
this result. The concentration camp, the death of free inquiry, and
the triumph of Munich have been as potent as Goebbels' lies to prepare
the German people for total war; so that they have not reacted against
Hitler when a prediction has failed or a promise gone sour.
Each of these methods has been consistently followed. Our
propagandists on the home front began with the knowledge that a great
part of the country did not want a war; a rather grim choice was
presented: to frighten the people, or to baby them. The early
waverings about Pearl Harbor reflected the dilemma; the anger roused
by Pearl Harbor gave time to the propagandist to plan ahead. The
result has been some excellent and some fumbling propaganda; but no
principle has yet come to light.
_Propaganda must supply positive symbols._ The symbol, the slogan, the
picture, which unites the citizen, and inspires to action, can be
created by an individual, but can only be made effective by correct
propaganda. The swastika is a positive symbol, a mark of unity
(because it was once a mark of the revolutionary outcast); we have no
such symbol. Uncle Sam is a cartoonists' fiction, too often appearing
in comic guises, too often used in advertising, no longer
corresponding even to the actuality of the American physique. The
Minute-man has an antique flavor but is not sufficiently generalized;
he is a brilliant defensive symbol and corresponded precisely to the
phase of the militia, an "armed citizenry" leaping to the defense of
the country. With my prejudice it is natural that I should suggest the
Liberty Bell as a positive symbol of the thing we fight for. It is
possible to draw its form on a wall--not to ward off evil, but to
inspire fortitude.
_Propaganda must be independent._ It is a fighting arm; it has (or
should have) special techniques; it is based on researches,
measurements, comparisons, all approaching a scientific method. It
should therefore be recognized as a separate function; Mr. Gorham
Munson, preceded by Mr. Edward L. Bernays in 1928, has proposed a
Secretary for Propaganda in the Cabinet, which would make the direct
line of authority from the Executive to the administrators of policy,
without interference. The conflicts of publicity (aircraft versus Navy
for priorities, for instance) will eventually force some organization
of propaganda. The confusion of departmental interests is a constant
drawback to propaganda, even if there is no direct conflict.
_Propaganda must be popular._ Since the first World War several new
ways of approaching the American people have been developed. These
have been chiefly commercial, as the radio and the popular illustrated
magazine; the documentary moving picture has never been popular,
except for the March of Time, but it has been tolerated; in the past
two years a new type, the patriotic short, has been skilfully
developed. The full length picture has hardly ever been used for
direct communication; it is a "morale builder", not a propaganda
weapon.
_Propaganda must be measured._ At the same time the method of the
selective poll has been developed in several forms and a quick,
dependable survey of public sentiment can be used to check the
effectiveness of any propaganda. Recent refinements in the techniques
promise even greater usefulness; the polls "weight" themselves, and,
in effect, tell how important their returns should be considered. The
objections to the polling methods are familiar; but until something
better comes along, the reports on opinion, and notably on the
fluctuations of opinion, are not to be sneered away. To my mind this
is one of the basic operations of propaganda; and although I have no
evidence, I assume that it is constantly being done.
_Who Can Do It?_
An effective use of the instruments is now possible. We may blunder in
our intentions, but technical blunders need not occur; the people who
have used radio or print or pictures are skilled in their trade and
they can use it for the nation as they used it for toothpaste or
gasoline. And the people of America are accustomed to forms of
publicity and persuasion which need not be significantly altered.
Moreover, we can measure the tightness of our methods in the field,
not by rejoicing over "mail response", or newspaper comment, but by
discovering exactly how far we have created the attitude of mind and
the temper of spirit at which we aim.
The advertising agency and the sampler of public opinion can supply
the groundwork of a flexible propaganda method. They cannot do
everything, because certain objectives have always escaped them. But
they are the people who have persuaded most effectively and reported
most accurately the results of persuasion. They cannot create policy,
not even the policy of propaganda; but they can propagandize.
All of this refers to propaganda at home. It need not be called
propaganda, but it must _be_ propaganda--the organized use of all
means of communication to create specific attitudes, leading to--or
from--specific action.
_What Is Morale's Pulse?_
This is, of course, another way of saying that morale is affected by
propaganda. I avoid the word "morale" because it has unhappily fallen
into a phrase, "boosting morale", or "keeping morale at a high level."
We have it on military authority that morale is an essential of
victory, but no authority has told us how to create it, nor exactly to
what high level morale should be "boosted". The concept of morale
constantly supercharged by propaganda is fatally wrong; it confuses
morale with cheerfulness and leads to the dangerous fluctuations of
public emotion on which our enemies have always capitalized.
Morale should be defined as a desirable and effective attitude toward
events. As despair and defeatism are undesirable, they break up
morale; as cheerfulness leads at times to ineffectiveness, it is bad
for morale. To induce cheerfulness in the week of Singapore, the
burning of the Normandie, and the escape of the German battleships
from Brest, would have been the worst kind of morale-boosting; to
prevent elation over a substantial victory would have been not quite
so bad, but bad enough.
There is a "classic example" of the effect of belittling a victory.
The British public first got details of the Battle of Jutland from the
German announcement of a naval victory, including names and number of
British vessels sunk. The first British communique was no more subdued
than usual, but coming _after_ the German claims and making no
assertions of victory, taking scrupulous care to list _all_ British
losses and only positively observed German losses, the announcement
pulled morale down--not because it gave bad news, but because it put a
bad light on good news; it did not allow morale to be level with
events. The best opinion of the time considered Jutland a victory
lacking finality, but with tremendous consequences; and Churchill was
called in as a special writer to do the Admiralty's propaganda on the
battle after the mischief was done. The time element was against him
for a belated explanation is never as effective as a quick capture of
the field by bold assertion and proof. Mr. Churchill was himself
belated, a generation later, when he first defended the Navy for
letting the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst escape and then, a day later,
asserted that the ships had been compelled to leave Brest and that
their removal was a gain for the British. The point is the same in
both cases: the truth or an effective substitute may be used; but it
has to correspond to actuality. The Admiralty underplayed its
statement at Jutland. Churchill over-explained the situation at Brest.
Both were bad for morale.
_The Hypodermic Technique_
The "shot-in-the-arm" theory of morale is a confession of incompetence
in propaganda. For the healthy human being does not need sudden
injections of drugs, not even for exceptional labors; and the
objective of propaganda is to create an atmosphere in which the
average citizen will work harder and bear more discomfort and live
through more anxiety and suffer greater unhappiness _without
considering his situation exceptional or abnormal_.
To "boost morale", to give the public a shot of good news (or even a
shot of bad news), is an attempt to make us live above our normal
temperature, to speed up our heart-beat and our metabolism. War itself
raises the level; and all we have to do for morale is to stay on the
new level.
The principle that the citizen must not consider his situation
exceptional is one of the few accepted by democratic and autocratic
States alike. Hitler announces that until the war is over he will wear
a simple soldier's uniform; Churchill refuses to accept a hoard of
cigars; the President buys a bond. In every case the conspicuous head
of a nation does what the average citizen has to do; and because each
citizen is like his leader, all citizens are like one another. A unity
is created.
_Re-Uniting America_
This completes the circle which began with our need for unity, and
proceeded through propaganda to morale. For the foundation of our war
effort has to be unity and the base of good morale is the feeling of
one-ness in the privations and in the triumphs of war. We can now
proceed to some of the reasons for the breaks in unity, which
propaganda has not seen, nor mended.
First, the propagandists have rejected certain large groups of
Americans because of pre-war pacifism; second, they have failed to
recognize the use to which isolationism can be put; third, they have
not thought out the principles of free criticism in a democracy at
war. To rehearse all the other forms of separatist action would be to
recall angers and frustrations dormant now, just below the level of
conscious action. Moreover, a list of the causes of separation, with a
remedy for each, would repeat the error of civilian propaganda in the
early phases of the war--it would still be negative, and the need now
is to set in motion the positive forces of unity, which have always
been available to us.
_The accord we need is for free and complete and effective action, for
sweating in the heat and crying in the night when disaster strikes,
for changing the face of our private world, for losing what we have
labored to build, for learning to be afraid and to suffer and to
fight; it is an accord on the things that are vital because they are
our life: what have we been, what shall we do, what do we want--past,
present, future; history, character, destiny._
The propaganda of the first six months of the war was not directed to
the creation of unity in this sense; it was not concerned with
anything but the immediate daily feeling of Americans toward the day's
news; the civilian propagandists insisted that "disunity is ended"
because all Americans knew what they were fighting for, so that it
became faintly disloyal to point out that reiteration was not proof
and that disunity could end, leaving mere chaos, a dispersed
indifferent emotion, in its place. The end of dissension was not
enough; unity had to be created, a fellow-feeling called up from the
memory of the people, binding them to one another because it bound
them to our soil and our heroes and our myths and our realities; and
the act of creation of unity automatically destroyed disunion; when
the gods arrive, not only the half-gods, but the devils also, depart.
_Myth and Money_
Faintly one felt a lack of conviction in the propagandists themselves.
They were afraid of the debunkers, under whose shadow they had grown
up. They did not venture to create an effective myth. Myth to them was
Washington's Cherry Tree, and Lincoln's boyish oath against slavery
and Theodore Roosevelt's Wild West; so they could not, with rhetoric
to lift the hearts of harried men and women, recall the truth-myth of
America, the loyalty which triumphed over desertion at Valley Forge,
the psychological miracle of Lincoln's recovery from self-abasement to
create his destiny and shape the destiny of the New World; the health
and humor and humanity of the west as Roosevelt remembered it. At
every point in our history the reality had something in it to touch
the imagination, the heart, to make one feel how complex and fortunate
is the past we carry in us if we are Americans.
The propagandists were also afraid of the plutocrats--as they were
afraid of the myth, they were afraid of reality. They did not dare to
say that America was an imperfect democracy whose greatness lay in the
chance it gave to all men to work for perfection; they did not dare to
say that the war itself must create democracy over again, they did not
dare to proclaim liberty to this land or to all lands; in the name of
unity they could not offend the enemies of human freedom.
Moreover, the propagandists for unity had to defend the
Administration. The rancor of politics had never actually disappeared
in America, during wars; it was barely sweetened by a trace of
patriotism three months after the war began. As a good fight needs two
sides, defenders of the President were as happy as his opponents to
call names, play politics, and distress the country. The groundwork
for defeating the nation's aims in war was laid before those aims had
been expressed; and one reason why we could make no proclamation of
our purpose was that our purpose was clouded over; we had not yet gone
back to the source of our national strength; and we had not yet begun
to use our strength to accomplish a national purpose.
We were effecting a combination of individual capacities--not a unity
of will. We were adding one individual to another, a slow process: we
needed to multiply one by the other--which can only be done in
complete union of purpose.
Some of the weakness of propaganda rose from its mixed intentions: to
make us hate the enemy, to make us understand our Allies, to harden us
for disaster, to defend the conduct of the war, to make us pay, to
assure us that production was terrific, and then to make us pay more
because production was inadequate; to silence the critics of the
Administration, to appease the men of violence crying for Vichy's
scalp or the men of violence crying for formulation of war aims. All
these things _had_ to be done, promptly and effectively. They would
have to be done no matter how unified in feeling we were; and they
could not be done at all unless unity came first.
_Call Back the Pacifists_
Small purposes were put first because the propagandists suffered from
their own success. They had gone ahead of all and had brilliantly been
teaching the American people the meaning of the European war; they
were among the President's most potent allies and they deserve well of
the country; the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and
the other active interventionist groups were a rallying point for the
enemies of Hitler, and a strong point for attack by all the pacifists.
But the moment the aim of these committees was accomplished and war
was declared, the first objective must have been the re-incorporation
of the pacifist 40% of our population into the functioning national
group. The actual enemies of the country soon declared themselves; the
hidden ones could be discovered. The millions who did not want to go
to war had to be persuaded first of all that _we_ understood why
_they_ had been pacifists; we could not treat them as cowards, or
pro-Germans, or Reds, or idiots. We needed the best of them to unite
the country, and all of them to fight for it.
Our propagandists did not know how to turn to their advantage the
constant, native, completely sensible pacifism of the American people,
especially of the Midwestern Americans. If the history of the United
States has meaning, the pacifism of the Midwest is bound to become
dominant; our part in the first World War achieved grandeur because
the people of the Middle West, at least, meant it to be a war to end
war, a war to end pacifism also, because there would be no need for
it. The people of the Middle West want our position in the world to
keep us out of the wars of other nations; they saw no wars into which
we could be drawn. They were wrong--but their instincts were not
wrong. They do not believe that the wars of the United States have
been like the wars of other nations; nor that the United States must
now look forward to such a series of wars as every nation of Europe
has fought for domination or survival. This may be naive, as to the
past and the future; but it is a naivete we cannot brush aside. It
rises from too many natural causes. And the people of the Middle West
may, if need be, fight to make their dream of peace come true; they
will have to fight the American imperialists, whom they have fought
before; and this time they will have new allies; for the pacifist of
the Midwest will be joined by the pacifists of the industrial cities;
and the great hope of the future is that the pacifists of America will
help to organize the world after the war.
_They will not help if they remain isolationists; and they will remain
isolationist, in the middle of a global war, until they are certain
that a world-order they can join is to be the outcome of the war._
Again, our propagandists have to understand isolationism, an historic
American tradition in one sense, a falsehood in another. Our dual
relation to Europe is expressed in two phrases:
We _came from_ Europe.
We _went away from_ Europe.
For a time we were anti-European; now we are non-Europe; if Europe
changes, we may become pro-European; but we can never be part of
Europe. Isolation is half our story; communication the other. On the
foundation of half the truth, the isolationist built the fairy tale of
physical separation; the interventionist, on the basis of our
communication with Europe, built more strongly--the positive overbore
the negative. Yet the whole structure of our relation to Europe has to
be built on both truths, we have to balance one strength with the
other. We cannot make war or make peace without the help of the
isolationists; and to jeer at them because they failed to understand
the mathematics of air power and sea-bases is not to reconcile them
to us; nor, for that matter, is it peculiarly honest. For few of those
who wanted us to go to war against England's enemy warned us that we
should have to fight Japan also; and none, so far as I know, told us
that the task of a two-ocean war might be for several years a burden
of losses and defeat.
The defeat of pacifist isolationism was not accomplished by the
interventionists, but by Japan. The interventionists, because they
were better prophets, gained the appearance of being truer patriots;
they were actually more intelligent observers of the war in Europe and
more passionately aware of its meaning. But they can be trusted with
propaganda only if they recognize the positive value of their former
enemies, and do not try to create a caste of ex-pacifist
"untouchables." That is the method of totality; it is Hitler declaring
that liberals cannot take part in ruling Germany, and Communists
cannot be Germans. Unity does not require us to destroy those who have
differed with us, it requires total agreement as to aims, and
temporary assent as to methods; we cannot tolerate the action of those
who want Hitler to defeat us, just as the body cannot tolerate cells
which proliferate in disharmony with other cells, and cause cancer. We
cannot afford the time to answer every argument before we take any
action, so temporary assent is needed (the Executive in war time
automatically has it because he orders action without argument). In
democratic countries we add critical examination after the event, and
free discussion of future policy as correctives to error. None of
these break into unity; none requires the isolation of any group
except the enemies of the State.
The purpose of unity is effective action--more tanks and planes,
delivered more promptly; more pilots, better trained; more people
helping one another in the readjustments of war. It is part of the
groundwork of morale; in a democracy it is based on reconciliation,
not on revenge.
_The Limits of Criticism_
The pacifists and the isolationists are being punished for their
errors if their legitimate emotions are not recognized as part of the
natural composition of the American mind. Criticism presents a problem
more irritating because it is constantly changing its form and because
no principle of action has been evolved.
At one of the grimmest moments of the war, a correspondent of the _New
York Times_ wrote that "for a while not politics but the war effort
appeared to have undergone an 'adjournment'". At another, the
President remarked that he did not care whether Democrats or
Republicans were elected, provided Congress prosecuted the war
energetically, and comment on this was that the President wanted to
smash the two-party system, in order to have a non-critical Congress
under him as he had had in 1933.
Both of these items suggest, that propaganda has not yet taught us how
to criticize our government in war time. The desirable limits of
criticism have not been made clear. Every attack on the Administration
has been handled as if it were treason; and there has been a faint
suggestion of party pride in the achievements of our factories and of
our bombers. Neither the war nor criticism of the war can be a
party-matter; and no party-matter can be tolerated in the path of the
war effort. All Americans know this, but the special application of
this loyalty to our present situation has to be clarified. It has been
left obscure.
For the question of criticism is connected with the problem of unity
in the simplest and most satisfying way. The moment we have unity, we
can allow all criticism which rises from any large group of people.
Off-center criticism, from small groups, is dangerous. It does not ask
questions in the public mind, and its tendency is to divert energies,
not to combine them; small groups, if they are not disloyal, are the
price we pay for freedom of expression in war time; it is doubtful
whether, at present, any American group can do much harm; it is even a
matter of doubt whether Eugene V. Debs or several opposition senators
were a graver danger to the armies of the United States in 1917. Small
groups may be tolerated or, under law, suppressed; large groups never
expose themselves to prosecution, but their criticism is serious and
unless it is turned to advantage, it may be dangerous.
The tendency of any executive, in war time, is to consider any
criticism as a check on war effort. It is. If a commanding officer has
to take five minutes to explain an order, five minutes are lost; if
the President, or the head of OPM, has to defend an action or reply to
a critic, energy is used up, time is lost. But time and energy may be
lost a hundred times more wastefully if the explanation is not given,
if the criticism is not uttered and grows internally and becomes
suspicion and fear. Freedom of criticism is, in our country, a
positive lever for bringing morale into logical relation to events.
The victims of criticism can use it positively, their answers can
create confidence; and best of all, it can be anticipated, so that it
can do no harm.
But this is true only if the right to criticize is subtly transformed
into a duty; if, in doing his duty, the citizen refuses to criticize
until he is fully informed; if the State makes available to the
citizen enough information on which criticism can be based. Then the
substance and the intention of criticism become positive factors in
our fight for freedom.
Since it is freedom we are fighting for.
Freedom, nothing else, is the source of unity--our purpose in the war,
our reason for fighting. On a low level of survival we have forgotten
some of our differences and combined our forces to fight because we
were attacked; on the high level which makes us a nation we are united
to fight for freedom, and this unites us to one another because it
unites us with every American who ever fought for freedom. Most
particularly our battle today unites us with those who first
proclaimed liberty throughout the land.
CHAPTER V
The Forgotten Document
To distract attention, to put people's minds on useless or bewildering
projects is a bit of sabotage, in a total war. It is well enough to
divert people, for a moment, so that they are refreshed; but no one
has the right to confuse a clear issue or to start inessential
projects or to ask people to look at anything except the job in hand.
For five minutes, I propose a look at the Declaration of Independence,
because it is the one document essential to our military and moral
success; it is the standard by which we can judge the necessity of all
projects; and although our destiny, and the means to fulfill it, are
written into it, the Declaration is the forgotten document of American
history. We remember the phrases too often repeated by politicians and
dreamers; we do not study the hard realistic plan of national action
embodied in every paragraph of the instrument.
The famous phrases at the beginning give the moral, and revolutionary,
reason for action; the magnificent ground plan of the character and
history of the American people is explained in the forgotten details
of the Declaration; and nothing in the conservative Constitution could
do more than delay the unfolding of the plan or divide its fruits a
little unevenly.
I suggest that the Declaration supplies the _motive_ of action for
today; the moment we understand it, we have a definition of America, a
specific blueprint of what we have been, what we are, and what we can
become--and the action necessary for our future evolves from this;
moreover the unnecessary action is likewise defined. Our course before
we were attacked and our plans for the world after the war may seem
the mere play of prejudice and chance; but the destiny of America
will be determined not by the affections of one group or the fears of
another, nor by hysteria and passion; our fate will be determined by
the whole course of our history--and by our decision to continue its
direction or to reverse it.
The rest of this book flows out of this belief in the decisive role of
the Declaration, but it does not attempt to indicate a course of
action in detail. For the sake of illustration I cite these instances.
_Q._ Should the U.S. try to democratize the Germans or accept the view
that the Germans are a race incapable of self-government?
_A._ The history of immigration, based on the Declaration, proves that
Germans are capable of being good and great democratic citizens.
_Q._ Can the U.S. unite permanently with any single nation or any
exclusive group of nations?
_A._ Our history, under the Declaration, makes it impossible.
_Q._ Can the U.S. join a world federation regulating specific economic
problems, such as access to raw materials, tariffs, etc.?
_A._ Nothing in the Declaration is against, everything in our history
is for, such a move.
_Q._ Can the U.S. fight the war successfully without accepting the
active principles of the Totalitarian States?
_A._ If our history is any guide, the only way we can _lose_ the war
is by failing to fight it in our own way.
I have already indicated the possibility that our whole military grand
plan must be based on variety, which is the characteristic of America
created by specific passages in the Declaration; I am sure that the
whole grand plan of civilian unity (the plan of morale and propaganda)
has to return to the leading lines of our history, if we want to act
quickly, harmoniously and effectively; and the peace we make will be
another Versailles, with another Article X in the Covenant, if we make
it without returning to the sources of our strength.
So, if we want to win in the field and at home, win the war and the
peace, we must be aware of our history and of the principles laid down
in 1776 and never, in the long run, betrayed.
_To Whom It May Concern_
The Declaration is in four parts and all of them have some bearing on
the present.
The first explains why the Declaration is issued. The words are so
familiar that their significance is gone; but if we remember that days
were spent in revision and the effect of every word was calculated, we
can assume that there are no accidents, that the Declaration is
precise and says what it means. Here is the passage:
"_When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for
one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected
them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth,
the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and
of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions
of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which
impel them to the separation._"
The first official utterance of America is based on _human
necessity_--not the necessity of princes or powers.
It is the utterance of a people, not a nation. It invokes first Nature
and then Nature's God as lawgivers.
It asks independence and equality--in the same phrase; the habit of
nations, to enslave or be enslaved, is not to be observed in the New
World.
And finally "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"; the first
utterance of America is addressed not to the nations of the world, but
to the men and women who inhabit them.
_Human--people--Nature--Nature's God--mankind._
These are the words boldly written across the map of America. A
century and a half of change have not robbed one of them of their
power--because they were not fad-words, not the catchwords of a
revolution; they were words with cold clear meanings--and they
destroyed feudalism in Europe for a hundred and sixty years.
The practical application of the preamble is this: whenever we have
spoken to the people of other nations, as we did in the Declaration,
we have been successful; we have failed only when we have addressed
ourselves to governments. The time is rapidly coming when our only
communication with Europe must be over the heads of its rulers, to the
people. It does not seem practical; but we shall see later that, for
us, it has always been good politics.
_The Logic of Freedom_
The next passage in the Declaration is the one with all the
quotations. There can be little harm in reprinting it:
"_We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form
of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and
organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed,
will dictate that Governments long established should not be
changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all
experiences hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to
suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by
abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a
long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the
same object, evidence a design to reduce them under absolute
Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off
such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future
security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these
Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them
to alter their former System of Government The history of the
present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries
and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment
of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let
Facts be submitted to a candid world._"
Starting off with a rhetorical device--the pretense that its heresies
are acceptable commonplaces, this long paragraph builds a philosophy
of government on the unproved and inflammatory assumptions which it
calls "self-evident". The self-evident truths are, in effect, _the
terms agreed upon by the signers_. These signers now appear for the
first time, they say "_we_ hold", they say that, to themselves,
certain truths are self-evident. The first three of "these truths" are
some general statements about "all men"; the fourth and fifth tell why
governments are established and why they should be overthrown. These
two are the objective of the first three; but they have been neglected
in favor of adolescent disputation over the equality of men at birth,
and they have been forgotten in our adult pursuit of happiness which
has often made us forget that life and liberty, no less than large
incomes, are among our inalienable rights.
The historians of the Declaration always remind us of John Locke's
principle that governments exist only to protect property; when States
fail they cease to be legitimate, they can be overthrown; and Locke is
taken to be, more than Rousseau, the inspiration of the Declaration.
The Declaration, it happens, never mentions the right to own property;
but the argument for revolution is essentially the same: when a
government ceases to function, it should be overthrown. The critical
point is the definition of the chief duty of a government. The
Colonists, in the Declaration, said it is to secure certain rights to
all men; not to guarantee privileges granted by the State, but to
protect rights which are born when men are born, in them, with
them--inalienably theirs.
So the Declaration sets us for ever in opposition to the totalitarian
State--for that State has all the inalienable rights, and the people
exist only to protect the State.
The catalogue of rights is comparatively unimportant; once we agree
that the State exists to secure inherent rights, the great
revolutionary stride has been taken; and immediately we see that our
historic opposition to Old Europe is of a piece with our present
opposition to Hitler. The purpose of our State is not the purpose of
the European States; we might work with them, side by side, but a
chemical union would result only in an explosion.
There is one word artfully placed in the description of the State; the
Declaration does not say that governments derive their powers from the
consent of the governed. It says that governments instituted among men
to protect their rights "derive their _just_ powers from the consent of
the governed". Always realistic, the Declaration recognizes the
tendency of governors to reach out for power and to absorb whatever the
people fail to hold. The idea of consent is also revolutionary--but the
moment "inalienability" is granted, consent to be governed _must_
follow. The fascist state recognizes _no_ inalienable right, and needs
no consent from its people.
It is "self-evident", I think, that we have given wrong values to the
three elements involved. We have talked about the "pursuit of
happiness"; we have been impressed by the idea of any right being ours
"for keeps", inalienable; and we have never thought much about the
fundamental radicalism of the Declaration: that it makes government
our servant, instructed _by us_ to protect our rights. The chain of
reasoning, as the Declaration sets it forth, leads to a practical
issue:
All men are created equal--their equality lies in their having
rights;
these rights cannot be alienated;
governments are set up to prevent alienation;
power to secure the rights of the people is given by the people
to the government;
and if one government fails, the people give the power to
another.
So in the first three hundred words of the Declaration the purpose of
our government is logically developed.
_Blueprint of America_
There follows first a general and then a particular condemnation of
the King of England. This is the longest section of the Declaration.
It is the section no one bothers to read; the statute of limitations
has by this time outlawed our bill of complaint against George the
Third. But the grievances of the Colonials were not high-pitched
trifles; every complaint rises out of a definite desire to live under
a decent government; and the whole list is like a picture, seen in
negative, of the actual government the Colonists intended to set up;
and the basic habits of American life, its great traditions, its good
fortune and its deficiencies are all foreshadowed in this middle
section. Here--for the sake of completeness--is the section:
"_He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary
for the public good._
"_He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and
pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his
Assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has utterly
neglected to attend them._
"_He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large
districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of
Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and
formidable to tyrants only._
"_He has called together legislative bodies at places, unusual,
uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public
Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with
his measures._
"_He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with
manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people._
"_He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause
others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of
Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise;
the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of
invasion from without, and convulsions within._
Here I omit one "count", reserved for separate consideration.
"_He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his
Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers._
"_He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of
their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries._
"_He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of
Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance._
"_He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without
the Consent of our legislatures._
"_He has affected to render the Military Independent of and superior
to the Civil power._
"_He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign
to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent
to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For quartering large bodies of
armed troops among us: For protecting them by a mock Trial from
punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants
of these States: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the
world: For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by
jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended
offenses: For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a
neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government,
and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and
fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these
Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable
Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: For
suspending our own Legislatures and declaring themselves invested with
power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever._
"_He has abdicated Government here by declaring us out of his
Protection and waging War against us._
"_He has plundered our seas, ravished our Coasts, burnt our towns, and
destroyed the lives of our people._
"_He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries
to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun
with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the
most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized
nation._
"_He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high
Seas to bear Arms against friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves
by their Hands._
"_He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored
to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian
Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction
of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these Oppressions
We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated
Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose
character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is
unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We been wanting in
attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to
time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable
jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of
our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native
justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our
common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably
interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf
to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore,
acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our Separation, and hold
them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace
Friends._"
The eighteen paragraphs of denunciation fall into seven general
sections:
The King has thwarted representative government;
he has obstructed justice;
he has placed military above civil power;
he has imposed taxes without the consent of the taxed;
he has abolished the rule of Law;
he has placed obstacles in the way of the growth and prosperity
of the Colonies;
he has, in effect, ceased to rule them, because he is making war
on them.
So the bill of complaint signifies these things about the Founders of
our Country:
They demanded government with the consent, by the
representatives, of the governed.
They cherished civil rights, respect for law, and would not
tolerate any power superior to law--whether royal or military.
They wished for a minimum of civil duties, hated bureaucrats,
wanted to adjust their own taxes, and were afraid of the
establishment of any tyranny on nearby soil.
They wanted free trade with the rest of the world, and no
restraints on commerce and industry.
They intended to be prosperous.
They considered themselves freemen and proposed to remain so.
These were the rights to which lovers of human freedom aspired in
England or France; they were the practical application of Locke and
Rousseau and the Encyclopedists and the Roundheads. Little in the
whole list reflects the special conditions of life in the colonies;
troops had been quartered in Ireland, trial by jury suspended in
England, tyrants then as now created their Praetorian guard or Storm
Troops and placed military above civil rights, and colonies from early
time had been considered as tributaries of the Mother Country.
_The Practical "Dream"_
The American Colonists were about to break the traditions of European
settlement, and with it the traditions of European government. And,
with profound insight into the material conditions of their existence,
they foreshadowed the entire history of our country in the one
specification which had never been made before, and _could_ never have
been made before:
"_He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for
that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners;
refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and
raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands._"
This amazing paragraph is placed directly after the sections on
representative government; it is so important that it comes before the
items on trial by jury, taxation, and trade. It is a critical factor
in the history of America; if we understand it, we can go forward to
understand our situation today. The other complaints point toward our
systems of law, our militia, our constant rebellion against taxes, our
mild appreciation of civil duties, our unswerving insistence upon the
act of choosing representatives; all these are details; but this
unique item indicates how the nation was to be built and what its
basic social, economic, and psychological factors were to be.
This brief paragraph condemns the Crown for obstructing the two
processes by which America was made:
Immigration
Pioneering
With absolute clairvoyance the Declaration sets Naturalization, which
means political equality, in between the two other factors.
Naturalization is the formal recognition of the deep underlying truth,
the new thing in the new world, that one could _become_ what one
willed and worked to become--one could, regardless of birth or race or
creed, _become an American_.
So long as the colonies were held by the Crown, the process of
populating the country by immigration was checked. The Colonists had
no "dream" of a great American people combining racial bloods and the
habits of all the European nations. They wanted only to secure their
prosperity by growing; they constantly were sending agents to
Westphalia and the Palatinate to induce good Germans to come to
America, one colony competing with another, issuing pamphlets in
Platt-Deutsch, promising not Utopia with rivers of milk and honey, not
a dream, but something grander and greater--citizenship, equality
under the law, and land. Across this traffic the King and his
ministers threw the dam of Royal Prerogative; they meant to keep the
colonies, and they knew they could not keep them if men from many
lands came in as citizens; and they meant to keep the virgin lands
from the Appalachians to the Mississippi--or as much of it as they
could take from the Spaniards and the French. So as far back as 1763,
the Crown took over _all_ title to the 250,000 square miles of land
which are now Indiana and Illinois and Michigan and Minnesota, the
best land lying beyond the Alleghenies. Into this territory no man
could enter; none could settle; no squatters' right was recognized; no
common law ran. Suddenly the natural activity of America,
uninterrupted since 1620, stopped. The right of Americans to move
westward and to take land, the right of non-Americans to become
Americans, both were denied. The outcry from the highlands and the
forest clearing was loud; presently the seaboard saw that America was
one country, its true prosperity lay within its own borders, not
across the ocean. And to make the unity clear, the Crown which had
taken the land, now took the sea; the trade of the Colonies was
broken; they were cut off from Europe, forbidden to bring over its
men, forbidden to send over their goods. For the first time America
was isolated from Europe.
So the British Crown touched every focal spot--and bruised it. The
outward movement, to and from Europe, always fruitful for America, was
stopped; the inward movement, across the land, was stopped. The
energies of America had always expressed themselves in movement; when
an artificial brake on movements was applied, friction followed; then
the explosion of forces we call the Revolution.
And nothing that happened afterward could effectively destroy what the
Revolution created. The thing that people afterward chose to call "the
American dream" was no dream; it was then, and it remained, the
substantial fabric of American life--a systematic linking of free
land, free trade, free citizenship, in a free society.
A grim version of our history implies that the pure idealism of the
Declaration was corrupted by the rich and well-born who framed the
Constitution. As Charles Beard is often made the authority for this
economic interpretation, his own account of the economic effects of
the Declaration may be cited in evidence:
the great estates were broken up;
the hold of the first-born and of the dead-hand were equally
broken;
in the New States, the property qualification was never accepted
and it disappeared steadily from the old.
And the Ordnance of 1787, last great act of the Continental Congress,
inspired by the Declaration, created the Northwest Territory, the
heart of America for a hundred years, in a spirit of love and
intelligence which the Constitution in all its wisdom did not surpass.
That is what the Declaration accomplished. It set in action _all_ the
forces that ultimately made America. The action rose out of the final
section, in which, naming themselves for the first time as
"Representatives of the United States of America", the signers declare
that "these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and
Independent States...." In this clear insight, the Declaration says
that the things separating one people from another have already
happened--differences in experiences, desires, habits--and that the
life of the Colonies is already so independent of Britain that the
purely political bond must be dissolved.
"_WE, THEREFORE, the Representatives of the United States of America,
in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the
world for the rectitude of our intentions do, in the Name, and by
authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and
declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be,
Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all
Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection
between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally
dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full
Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish
Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States
may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm
reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to
each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor._"
So finally, as a unity of free and independent States, the new nation
arrogates to itself four specific powers:
To levy war
conclude peace
contract alliances
establish commerce.
Only these four powers, by name; the rest were lumped together, a
vast, significant et cetera; but these were so much more significant
that they had to be separately written down; three of
them--war--peace--alliances--are wholly international; the fourth,
commerce, at least partly so. The signers of the Declaration made no
mistake; they wished to be independent; and in order to remain
independent, they were fighting _against_ isolation.
The error we must not make about the Declaration is to think of it as
a purely domestic document, dealing with taxes and election of
representatives and Redcoats in our midst; it is the beginning of our
national, domestic life, but only because it takes the rule of our
life out of English hands; and the moment this is done, the
Declaration sets us up as an independent nation among other nations,
and places us in relation, above all, to the nations of Europe.
At this moment our intercourse with the nations of Europe is a matter
of life and death--death to the destroyer of free Europe or death to
ourselves; but if we live, life for all Europe, also. Like parachute
troops, our address to Europe must precede our armies; we have to know
what to say to Europe, to whom to say, how to say it. And the answer
was provided by the Declaration which let all Europe come to us--but
held us independent of all Europe.
CHAPTER VI
"The Population of These States"
In the back of our minds we have an image labeled "the immigrant"; and
it is never like ourselves. The image has changed from generation to
generation, but it has never been accurate, because in each generation
it is a political cartoon, an exaggeration of certain features to
prove a point. We have to tear up the cartoon; then we can get back to
the picture it distorts.
_English-Speaking Aliens_
The immigrant-cartoon since 1910 has been the South-European: Slavic,
Jewish, Italian; usually a woman with a shawl over her head, her
husband standing beside her, with slavic cheekbones or a graying
beard; and eager children around them. This is not a particularly
false picture of several million immigrants; among them some of the
most valuable this country has had. But it erases from our mind the
bare statistical fact that the largest single language group, nearly
_one third of all_ the immigrants to the United States, were
English-speaking. For several decades, the bulk of all immigration was
from Great Britain and Ireland. If one takes the three principal
sources of immigration for every decade between 1820 and 1930, one
finds that Germany and Ireland were among the leaders for sixty years;
Italy for forty; Russia only thirty; the great Scandinavian movement
to the middle west lasted a single decade; but Great Britain was one
of the chief sources of immigration for seventy years, and probably
was the principal source for thirty years more--from 1790 until
1820--during which time no official figures were kept.
Out of thirty-eight million arrivals in this country, about twelve
spoke the dominant tongue, and most of them were aware of the
tradition of Anglo-Saxon self-government; some had suffered from
British domination, more had enjoyed the fruits of liberty; but all
knew what liberty and respect for law meant. Many of these millions
fled from poverty; but most were not refugees from religious or
political persecution. Many millions came to relatives and friends
already established; and began instantly to add to the wealth of the
country; many millions were already educated. The cost of their
upbringing had been borne abroad; they came here grown, trained, and
willing to work. They fell quickly into the American system, without
causing friction; they helped to continue the dominance of the
national groups which had fought the Revolution and created the new
nation.
It is important to remember that they were, none the less, immigrants;
they made themselves into Americans and helped to make America; they
helped to make us what we are by keeping some of their habits, by
abandoning others. For this is essential: the British immigrant, even
when he came to a country predominantly Anglo-Saxon, did not remain
British and did not make the country Anglo-Saxon. The process of
change affected the dominant group as deeply as it affected the
minorities. It was a little easier for a Kentish man to become an
American than it was for a Serbian; but it was just as hard for the
man from Kent to remain a Briton as it was for the Serbian to remain a
Serb. Both became Americans. Neither of them tried to remake America
in the mold of his old country.
_Who Asked Them to Come?_
The next image in our minds is a bad one for us to hold because it
makes us feel smug and benevolent. It is the image of America, the
foster-mother of the world, receiving first the unfortunate and later
the scum of the old world. It is true that the oppressed came to
America, and that in the forty million arrivals there were criminals
as well as saints. The picture is false not only in perspective, but
in basic values. For in many generations, at the beginning, in the
middle, and at the end of the great inrush of Europeans, the United
States actively desired and solicited immigration.
Obviously when people were eager to emigrate, the solicitation fell
off; Irish famine and German reaction sent us floods of immigrants who
had not been individually urged to come. But their fathers and elder
brothers had been invited. The Colonies and the States in their first
years wanted settlers and, as noted, wrote their need for new citizens
into the Declaration; between two eras of hard times we built the
railroads of the country and imported Irish and Chinese to help the
Civil War veterans lay the ties and dig the tunnels; in the gilded age
and again at the turn of the century, we were enormously expanding and
again agents were busy abroad, agents for land companies, agents for
shipping, agents for great industries which required unskilled labor.
Moreover, the Congress of the United States refused to place any
restrictions upon immigration. The vested interest of labor might
demand restrictions; but heavy industry loved the unhappy foreigner
(the nearest thing to coolie labor we would tolerate) and made it a
fixed policy of the United States not to discourage immigration. The
only restriction was a technical one about contract labor. It did not
lower the totals.
_America Was Fulfilment!_
The moment we have corrected the cartoon we can go back to fact
without self-righteousness. The fact is that arrival in America was
the end toward which whole generations of Europeans aspired. It did
not mean instant wealth and high position; but it did mean an end to
the only poverty which is degrading--the poverty which is accepted as
permanent and inevitable. The shock of reality in the strike-ridden
mills around Pittsburgh, on the blizzard-swept plains of the Dakotas,
brought dismay to many after the gaudy promises made by steamship
agents and labor bosses. But in one thing America never failed its
immigrants--the promise and hope of better things for their children.
America was not only promises; America was fulfilment.
No one has measured the exact dollar-and-cents value of believing that
the next generation will have a chance to live better, in greater
comfort and freedom. In America this belief in the future was only a
projection of the parallel belief in the present; it was a reaction
against the European habit of assuming that the children would, with
luck, be able to live where their parents lived, on the same income,
in the same way. The elder son was fairly assured of this; war and
disease and colonies and luck would have to take care of the others.
The less fortunate, the oppressed, could not even hope for this much.
At various times the Jew in Russia, the liberal in Germany, the
Sicilian sulphur-miner, the landless Irish, and families in a dozen
other countries could only expect a worse lot for their children; they
had to uproot themselves and if they themselves did not stand
transplanting, they were sure their children would take root in the
new world.
And this confidence--which was always justified--became as much a part
of the atmosphere of America as our inherited parliamentary system,
our original town-meetings, our casual belief in civil freedom, our
passion for wealth, our habits of movement, and all the other
essential qualities which describe and define us and set us apart from
all other nations.
The immigrant knew his children would be born Americans; for himself
there was a more difficult and in some ways more satisfying fate: he
could _become_ an American. It was not a cant phrase; it had absolute
specific meaning. The immigrant became in essence one of the people of
the country.
As soon as he was admitted, he had the same civil rights as the
native; within a few years he could acquire all the basic political
rights; and neither the habits of the people nor the laws of the
government placed anything in the way of social equality; the
immigrant's life was his own to make.
This did not mean that the immigrant instantly ceased to be a Slav or
Saxon or Latin any more than it meant that he ceased to be freckled or
brunette. The immigrant became a part of American life because the
life of America was prepared to receive him and could not, for six
generations, get along without him.
_America Is Various_
During the years in which big business solicited immigration and
organized labor attacked it, the argument about the immigrant took an
unfortunate shift. The question was whether the melting pot was
"working", whether immigrants could be Americanized. There were people
who worried if an immigrant wore a shawl, when "old Americans" were
wearing capes; (the "old Americans" wore shawls when they arrived,
forty years earlier); it was "unfortunate" if new arrivals spoke with
an "accent" different from the particular American speech developed at
the moment. There were others who worried if an immigrant too quickly
foreswore the costume or customs of his native land. Employers of
unskilled labor liked to prevent superficial Americanization;
sometimes immigrants were kept in company villages, deliberately
isolated from earlier arrivals and native Americans; wages could be
kept low so long as the newcomers remained at their own level of
comfort, not at ours. Others felt the danger (foreseen by Franklin and
Jefferson) of established groups, solidified by common memories,
living outside the circle of common interests. The actual danger to
the American system was that it wouldn't work, that immigrants coming
in vast numbers would form separate bodies, associated not with
America but with their homeland. (This is precisely what happened in
Argentina, by the deliberate action of the German government, and it
is not an invention of Hitler's. Thomas Beer reports that "in 1892 ...
a German imperialist invited the Reichstag to secure the ...
dismemberment of the United States by planting colonies of civilized
Europeans" within our borders, colonies with their own religious
leaders, speaking their own language; German leaders never could
accept the American idea of change; in Hitler's mind a mystic "blood"
difference makes changing of nationality impossible.)
The first World War proved that the "new immigrants", the masses from
South Europe, as well as the Germans, could keep their ancient customs
and be good Americans; then observers saw that their worries over
"assimilation" were beside the point; because the essence of America's
existence was to create a unity in which almost all variety could find
a place--not to create a totality brooking no variation, demanding
uniformity. In the flush of the young century William James, as
typical of America as Edison or Theodore Roosevelt, looking about him,
seeing an America made up of many combining into one, made our variety
the base of his religious outlook. He had studied "the varieties of
religious experience", and he began, experimentally, to think of a
universe not necessarily totalitarian. He saw us building a country
out of diverse elements and found approval in philosophy. He saw
infinite change; "it would have depressed him," said a cynical and
admiring friend, "if he had had to confess that any important action
was finally settled"; just as it would have depressed America to admit
that the important action of creating America had come to an end.
James "felt the call of the future"; he believed that the future
"could be far better, totally other than the past". He was living in
an atmosphere of transformation, seeing men and women becoming "far
better, totally other" than they had been. He looked to a better
world; he helped by assuring us that we need never have one King, one
ruler, one fixed and unalterable fate. He said that there was no proof
of the one single Truth. He threw out all the old totalitarians, and
cast his vote for a pluralistic universe. We were building it
politically every day; without knowing it, James helped to fortify us
against the totalitarians who were yet to come.
This was, to be sure, not Americanization. It was the far more
practical thing: becoming American. Americanization was something
celebrated on "days"; it implied something to be done _to_ the
foreigners. The truth was that the immigrant needed only one thing, to
be allowed to experience America; then slowly, partially, but
consistently, he became an American. The immigrant of 1880 did not
become an American of the type of 1845; he became an American as
Americans were in his time; in every generation the mutual experience
of the immigrant, naturalized citizens and native born, created the
America of the next generation. And in every generation, the native
born and the older immigrants wept because _their_ America and their
way of becoming American had been outmoded. The process passed them
by; America had to be reborn.
So long as the immigrant thought of "taking out citizen papers" and
the native born was annoyed by accents, odd customs, beards and
prolific parenthood, the process of becoming American was not
observed, and the process of Americanization seemed obvious and
relatively unimportant.
The tremendous revolution in human affairs was hidden under social
discords and economic pressures. People began to think it was time to
slacken the flow of immigrants until we had absorbed what we had. Good
land was scarce; foreigners in factions began to join unions;
second-generation children grew up to be great tennis players and took
scholarships; the pure costless joy of having immigrants do the dirty
work was gone. The practical people believed something had to be done.
But the practical people forgot the great practical side--which is
also the mystical side--of our immigration. For the first time since
the bright days of primitive Christianity, a great thing was made
possible to all men: they could become what they wished to become. As
Peter said to the Romans, and Paul to the Athenians, that through
faith and desire and grace they could become Christians, equal, in the
eyes of God, to all other Christians, so the apostles of Freedom
spoke to the second son of an English Lord, to the ten sons of a
Russian serf, to old and young, ignorant and wise, befriended or
alone, and said that their will, their ambition, their work, and their
faith could make of them true Americans.
The instant practical consequences of this new element in human
history are incalculable. They are like the practical consequences of
early Christianity, which can be measured in terms of Empires and
explorations and Crusades. The transformation of millions of Europeans
into Americans was like the conversion of millions of pagans to
Christianity; it was accompanied by an outburst of confidence and
energy. The same phenomena occurred in the Renaissance and
Reformation, a period of conversion accompanied by a great surge of
trade, invention, exploration, wealth, and vast human satisfaction.
This idea of becoming American, as personal as religion, as mystical
as conversion, as practical as a contract, was in fact a foundation
stone of the growth and prosperity of the United States. It was a
practical result of the exact kind of equality which the Declaration
invoked; it allowed men to regain their birthright of equality,
snatched from them by tyrants. It persuaded them that they could enjoy
life--and allowed them to produce and to consume. In that way it was
as favorable to prosperity as our land and our climate. And it had
other consequences. For, as it stemmed from equality, it went deep
under the roots of the European system--and loosened them so that a
tremor could shake the system entirely.
_Change and Status_
For the European system stood against _becoming_; its objective was to
remain, to be still, to stand. Its ancient greatness and the tone of
time which made it lovely, both came from this faith in the steady
long-abiding changelessness of human institutions. All that it
possessed was built to endure for ever; its cathedrals, its prisons,
its symbols, its systems--including the symbols and the systems by
which it denied freedom to its people. Each national-racial-religious
complex of Europe was a triple anchor against change; it prevented men
from drifting as the great winds of revolution and reform swept over
Europe. Nor were men permitted to change, as they pleased. Nations
waged war and won land, but neither the Czars nor the German Emperors
thought of the Poles as their own people; the Poles were irrevocably
Poles, excluded from the nobler society of Russians, Austrians and
Germans. Religious societies made converts, but looked with fear or
hatred or suspicion against the very people from whom the converts
came--the Jew was irretrievably a Jew, the Catholic a Catholic. In
each country one religion was uppermost, the rest tolerated. In each
country one folk-group was dominant, the rest tolerated or persecuted.
And in each country one class--the same class--ruled, and all other
classes served.
By ones or twos, men and women might be accepted into the established
church, marry into the dominant race, rise to the governing class; but
the exceptions proved nothing. The European believed in his _station_
in life, his civil _status_, the _standing_ of his family in the
financial or social world. The Englishman settling in Timbuctoo
remained an Englishman because the Englishman at home remained a
middle-class bank clerk or "not a gentleman" or a marquess; and while
an alien could become a subject of the King, he never for a moment
imagined that he could become an Englishman--any more than a Scot. The
English knew that names change; men do not.
_Only when they came to America, they did._
They did because the basic American system, the dynamics of becoming
American, rejected the racialism of Europe; it rejected aggressive
nationalism by building a new nation; it rejected an established
religion; and almost in passing it destroyed the class-system.
To the familiar European systems of damnation--by original sin, by economic
determinism, by pre-natal influence--has been added a new one--damnation by
racial inferiority; the Chamberlain-Wagner-Nietzsche-Rosenberg-Hitler myth
of the superior race-nation means in practise that whoever is not born
German is damned to serve Germany; there is no escape because the
inferiority is inherent. This is the European class-system carried to
its loftiest point.
We say that this system is inhuman, unscientific, probably suicidal.
The poverty-system on which Europe "prospered" for generations and
into which we almost fell, was also inhuman, unscientific and probably
suicidal; there is no logic in the British aristocratic system coupled
with a financial-industrial overlordship and universal suffrage; there
is little logic even in our own setup of vast organizations of labor,
huge combinations of money, unplumbed technical skill hampered by both
capital and labor, and some forty million underfed and half sick human
beings in the most productive land in the world. It is not logic we
look for in the framework of human society; we look for operations.
What does it do? For all its failures, our system works toward human
liberty; for all its success, the Nazi system works against human
liberty. We tend to give more and more people an opportunity to change
and improve; their system is based on the impossibility of change. Our
system is a nation built out of many races; theirs is a nation
excluding all but one race. Our system has lapses, we do not grant
citizenship to certain Orientals nor social equality to Negroes; but
we do not write racial inferiority into our laws, we do not teach it
in _our_ schools (it may be taught in sectional schools we tolerate,
but do not support); and this is important. So long as we accept the
ideal of political equality, hope lives for every man. The moment we
abandon it, we nazify ourselves--and destroy the foundation of the
Republic.
_Americans All_
Turning from the brutal leveling and uniformity of the Nazis, good
Americans have begun to wish that more of the folk qualities of our
settlers had been preserved. At every point America is the enemy of
fasci-feudalism, and this is no exception. Our music, our dancing, the
language we speak, the foods we eat, all incorporate elements brought
from Europe; but we have not deliberately encouraged the second
generation to preserve clothes and cooking any more than we have
encouraged the preservation of political habits. There has been a loss
in variety and color; and now, while there is still time, efforts are
being made to create a general American interest in the separate
cultures combined here. It has to be carefully done, so that we do not
lose sight of the total American civilization in our enthusiasm for
the contributing parts. There is always the chance that descendants of
Norwegians, proud and desperate as they consider the plight of their
country, will become nationalistic here; and that they will not be
interested in the music or the art of Ukrainians in America; and that
Americans of Italian descent may be the only ones concerned in adding
to the Italian contribution to American life. This is the constant
danger of all work concerned with immigrant groups; and the
supersensitiveness of all these groups, in a period of intense
100%-ism, tends to defeat the purpose of assaying what each has done
to help all the others.
Yet some success is possible. In 1938 I worked with the Office of
Education on a series of broadcasts which drew its title from the
President's remark to the Daughters of the American Revolution, that
we are all the descendants of immigrants. (The President also added
"and revolutionaries", but this was not essential in our broadcasts.)
Everything I now feel about the focal position of the immigrant in
American life is developed from the work done on the Immigrants All
series and, especially, from the difficulties encountered, as well as
from one special element of success.
I set down some basic principles: that the programs would not
_glorify_ one national group after another; that the interrelation of
each arriving group to the ones already here would be noted; the vast
obligation of every immigrant to those who had prepared the way would
be stressed; cooperation between groups would be dramatically rendered
if possible; the immigrants' contribution to America would be
paralleled by America's contribution to the immigrant; and the making
of America, by its natives and its immigrants, would overshadow the
special contribution of any single group.
These were principles. In practise, some disappeared, but none was
knowingly violated. From time to time, enthusiasts for a given group
would complain that another had been more warmly treated; more serious
was the indifference of many leaders of national and folk groups to
the general problem of the immigrant, to any group outside their own.
We were, by that time, in a period of sharpened national
sensibilities; but this did not entirely account for an apparently
ingrained habit of considering immigrant problems as problems of one's
own group, only. Suspicion of other groups went with this neglect of
the problem as a whole; the natives born with longer American
backgrounds were the ones who showed a clearer grasp of the whole
problem; they were not bothered by jealousies and they were interested
in America.
On the other side, the series had an almost spectacular success. More
than half of the letters after each weekly broadcast came from men and
women who were _not_ descendants of the national group presented that
week. After the program on the Irish, some 48% of the letters were
from Irish immigrants or native-born descendants of the Irish; the
other 52% came from children of Serbs and FFV's and Jews and
Portuguese, from Sicilians and Germans and Scots, Scandinavians and
Englishmen and Greeks. It was so for all of the programs; the defects
of the scripts were forgotten, because the people who heard them were
so much better Americans than anyone had dared predict. Of a hundred
thousand letters, almost all were American, not sectarian in spirit;
the bitterness of the cheap fascist movements had not affected even a
fringe of the listeners. All in all, we were encouraged; it seemed to
us that the immigrant was accepted as the co-maker of America.
Much of our future depends on the exact place we give to the
immigrant. It has been taken for granted that immigration is over and
that the proportions of racial strains in America today are fixed for
ever. It is not likely that vast immigration will head for the United
States in the next decade; but the principle of "becoming American"
will operate for the quotas and the refugees; and it is now of greater
significance than ever because the great fascist countries have laid
down the principle of unchangeable nationality. The Nazi government
has pretended a right to call German-born American citizens to the
colors; and a regular practise of that government is to plant
"colonies" as spies.
If we do not re-assert the principle of change of nationality (the
legal counterpart to the process of becoming American) we will be lost
in the aggressive nationalism of the Nazis, and we will no longer be
safe from racialism. Preposterous as it will seem to scholars,
degrading as it will be to men of sense, racialism can establish
itself in America by the re-assertion of Anglo-Saxonism (with
variations).
_Are We Anglo-Saxon?_
At this point the direct political implications of "becoming American"
become evident. Toward the end of this book there are some questions
about union with Britain; the point to note here is that so far as
Union-now (or any variant thereof) is based emotionally on the
Anglo-Saxonism of the United States of America, it is based on a myth
and is politically an impossible combination; if we plan union with
Britain, let it be based on the actuality of the American status, not
on a snobbish desire. We cannot falsify our history, not even in favor
of those who did most for our history.
There is a way, however, of imputing Anglo-Saxonism to America, which
is by starting with the great truth: the English and the Scots--and the
Scots-Irish--founded the first colonies (some time after the Spaniards
to be sure, but that is "a detail"); they established here certain
basic forms of law and cultivated the appetite for freedom; they were
good law-abiding citizens, and accustomed to self-discipline; they were
great pioneers in the wilderness; they suffered for religious liberty
and more than any other national or racial group, they fought the War
of Independence.
Can we say these men created the true, the original America; and
everything since then has been a corruption of its 100% goodness and
purity? This would allow us to rejoice in Andrew Carnegie, but not in
George W. Goethals; in Hearst but not in Pulitzer; in Cyrus McCormick
but not in Eleuthere Dupont; in the Wright Brothers, but not in Boeing
and Bellanca; in Edison (partly as he was not all Scot) but not in his
associate Berliner; in Bell who invented the telephone but not in
Pupin who created long distance. We should have to denounce as
un-American the civil service work of Carl Schurz and Bela Schick's
test for diphtheria and Goldberger's work on pellagra (which was
destroying the pure descendants of the good Americans); we would have
to say that America would be better off without Audubon and Agassiz
and Thoreau; or Boas and Luther Burbank; or John Philip Sousa and Paul
Robeson and Jonas Lie.
When we have denied all these their place in America, we can begin to
belittle the contribution of still others to our national life. For
the later immigrants had less to give to transportation and basic
manufactures and to building the nation. These things were done by the
earlier immigrants. The later ones gave their sweat and blood, and
presently they and their children were troubling about education, or
civil service, or conservation of forests, or the right of free
association, or art or music or philanthropy. If our own special
fascists lay their hands on our traditions, the burning of books will
be only a trifle; for they will tear down the museums and the
settlement houses, the kindergartens and the labor temples--and when
they are done they will say, with some truth, that they have purged
America of its foreign influence. All reform, all culture will be
destroyed by the New Klansmen, and they will re-write history to make
us believe that wave after wave of corruption came from Europe
(especially from Catholic and Greek Orthodox and Jewish Europe) to
destroy the simple purity of Anglo-Saxon America.
That is why, now, when we can still assess the truth, when we need the
help of every American, we must declare the truth, that there never
was a purely Anglo-Saxon United States. Frenchmen and Swedes and
Spaniards and Negroes and Walloons and Hollanders and Portuguese and
Finns and Germans and German Swiss were here before 1700; Quakers,
Catholics, Freethinkers and Jews fought side by side with Huguenots,
Episcopalians, Calvinists and Lutherans in the wars with the Indians.
In the colony of Georgia, in the year Washington was born, men of six
nations had settled: German Lutherans, Italian Protestants, Scots,
Swiss, Portuguese, Jews and English. In 1750 four times as many
Germans arrived in Pennsylvania as English and Irish together.
_The Creative Anglo-Saxon_
The greatness of the Anglo-Saxon contribution to America--the gift
greater than all their other great gifts--was the conception of a
state making over the people who came here, and made over by them. By
the end of the Revolution, power and prestige were in the hands of the
Anglo-Saxon majority; and in three successive instruments they
destroyed the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority: the Declaration of
Independence, the Ordnance of 1787, the Constitution. "Becoming" was
not an ideal and it was not the base of Anglo-Saxon society in
England; the concept of change and "becoming" was based on actuality;
on what was happening all over the colonial dominion. People were
becoming American, even before a new nation was born.
All that followed--the vast complexity of creating America, would have
been impossible without that first supreme act of creative
self-sacrifice. When the statesmen of our Revolutionary period
established the principles of statehood and naturalization and
citizenship in terms of absolute equality, they knew the risk they
ran. In Pennsylvania the official minutes were printed in both English
and German; in Maryland the Catholics were dominant; there were still
some influential Dutch along the upper Hudson who might secede from
New York. On the western boundary, unsettled, uneasy, lay the
Spaniards and the French. There was danger of division, everywhere;
but the great descendants of the English immigrants did not withdraw.
Their principle was equality; since men were born free, they could
_become_ equal if artificial barriers were removed. The statesmen of
that day declared for America; they knew that men did not, in this
country, remain Dutch or Portuguese; but grew into something else.
With their own eyes they had seen it happen. They pledged their lives
and sacred honor that it would happen again.
So, if ever we re-write history to prove that all the other nations
contributed nothing and failed to become Americans, we will also have
to write it down that the Anglo-Saxons failed more miserably than the
others. For the great idea, the practical dynamics of equality, was
theirs; they set it in motion, guarded it, and saw it triumph.
In the next ten years it will be impossible to extemporize an
immigration policy for the United States. The world economy will
change all around us; the dreadful alternations of plenty and
starvation may be adjusted and controlled; we may enter a world order
in which we will be responsible for a given number of souls, and some
of these may be admitted to our country. By that time we will have
learned that nationalist fascism and international communism are
powerless here; and no one but professional haters of America will be
left to bait the foreigners and persecute the alien.
But above all, by that time we will have had time to reassert the
great practical idea behind immigration and naturalization--the idea
of men making themselves over--as for a century and a half they have
made themselves into Americans.
_An Experiment in Evolution_
NOTE: I have used the phrase "becoming American" and defined it as it
defined itself; legally, in the customs of the country, it seems to
mean becoming a citizen; experimentally "becoming" has happened to us,
we have seen it happen, it means that we recognize an essential
affinity between an immigrant and Americans, living or dead.
Yet to many people the words may be vague; to others they may seem a
particularly dangerous lie. Those who are interested in certain
foreign groups, less promptly "Americanized", will protest that for
all this "becoming", some are not accepted as American; those who are
basically haters of all foreigners will say that the _law_ accepts
citizens, but no power on earth can make them Americans.
It is my experience that the phrases created by poets, politicians and
people are often the truest words about America; and one of the
profound satisfactions of life is to see the wild imagery of the poet
or the lush oratory of the politician come true, literally and exactly
true, scientifically demonstrated and proved.
In this particular case, absolute proof is still lacking, because we
are dealing with human beings, we cannot make controlled experiments.
We can observe and compare. Under the inspiration of the eminent
anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas, the research has been made; so far as
it goes it proves that the children of foreigners do become Americans.
Specifically, their gestures, the way they stand and the way they
walk, their metabolism and their susceptibility to disease, all tend
to become American. In all of these aspects, there is an American norm
or standard; and the children of immigrants forsaking the norm or
standard of the fatherland, grow to that of America.
The most entertaining of these researches was in the field of gesture.
The observers took candid movie shots of groups of Italians and of
Jews; they differ from one another and both differ from the American
mode (which is a composite, with probably an Anglo-Saxon dominant).
The observers found that the extreme gesture of the foreign-born Jew
is one in which a speaker gesticulates with one hand while with the
other he holds his opponent's arm, to prevent a rival movement; and
one case was noted in which the speaker actually gesticulated with the
other man's arm. To the American of native stock this is "foreign";
and research proves that the American is right; such gestures are
foreign even to the American-born children of the foreigner himself.
The typical foreign gesture disappears and the typical American
gesture takes its place.
And this is not merely imitation; it is not an "accent" disappearing
in a new land. Because metabolism and susceptibility to disease are as
certainly altered as gait and posture. The vital physical nature
changes in the atmosphere of liberty--as the mind and the spirit
change.
The frightened lie of racial doom which has fascinated the German mind
(under its meaner guise of racial superiority) was never needed in
America. Seeing men become Americans, the fathers of our freedom
declared that nothing should prevent them; they were not afraid of any
race because they knew that the men of all races would become
Americans. Their faith of 1776 begins to be scientifically proved
today; a hundred and sixty-six years of creative America proved it in
action.
It is on the basis of what Europeans became in America, that we now
have to consider our relations with the Europeans who remained in
Europe.
CHAPTER VII
Address to Europe
The communications of America and Europe have always run in two
channels: our fumbling, foolish diplomacy, our direct, candid,
successful dealings with the people.
Our first word was to the people of Europe; the Declaration of
Independence tried to incite the British people against their own
Parliament; and the "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" refers
to citizens, not to chancelleries. The Declaration was addressed to
the world; it was heard in Paris and later in a dozen provinces of
Germany, and in Savoy and in Manchester, and presently along the
Nevski and the Yellow River. Since 1776, the people of the world have
always listened to us, and answered. We have never failed when we have
spoken to the people.
After the Declaration, the American people spoke to all the people of
Europe in the most direct way: they invited Europeans to come here,
offering them land, wages, freedom; presently our railroads and
steamship lines solicited larger numbers; and the policy of the
government added inducements. Free immigration, and free movement,
demanded in the Declaration, made possible by laws under the
Constitution, were creating America. In domestic life we saw it at
once; but the effects of immigration on our dealings with Europe were
not immediate.
We need only remember that for a hundred and twenty years the peoples
of Europe and the people of the United States were constantly writing
to one another; not merely doing business together, but exchanging
ideas, mingling in marriage, coming together as dispersed families
come together. Whatever went on in the Mississippi Valley was known
along the fjords and in the Volga basin and by the Danube; if sulphur
was discovered in Louisiana it first impoverished Sicily--then brought
Sicilians to Louisiana; Greeks knew that sponges were to be found off
Tampa. And more and more people in America knew what was happening in
Europe--a famine, a revolution, a brief era of peace, a repressive
ministry, a reform bill. The constant interaction of Europe and
America was one beat of our existence--it was in counterpoint to the
tramp of the pioneer moving Westward; immigration and migration meshed
together.
Our government from time to time spoke to the governments of Europe. A
tone of sharp reproof was heard at times, a warm word for
revolutionaries was coupled with indignation against tyrants: Turkey,
the Dual Monarchy, the Tsar, all felt the lash--or Congress hoped they
felt it; in the Boer War, England was the victim of semi-official
criticism; and whenever possible, we were the first to recognize
republics, even if they failed to maintain themselves on the ruins of
monarchy. We fluttered official papers and were embarrassed by
protocol, not believing in it anyhow, and were outwitted or
out-charmed by second-rate diplomatists of Europe.
_People and Protocol_
The campaign platforms always demanded a "firm, vigorous, dignified"
diplomacy; the diplomacy of Europe was outwardly correct, inwardly
devious, shifting, flexible, and in our opinion corrupt. But our
address to the _people_ of Europe was, in all this time, so candid, so
persuasive, that we destroyed the chancelleries and recaptured our
losses. The first great communication, after 1776, was made by
Lincoln--it was not a single speech or letter, it was a constant
appeal to the conscience of the British people, begging them, as the
Declaration had done, to override the will of their rulers. And this
appeal also was successful; few events in our relations with England
are more moving than the action of the starving Midlanders. Their
government, like their men of wealth and birth, like their press and
parliament, were eager to see America split, and willing to see
slavery upheld in order to destroy democracy. But the men and women of
Manchester, starved by the Northern blockade of cotton, still begged
their government not to interfere with the blockade--and sent word to
Lincoln to assure him that the _people_ of Britain were on the side of
liberty, imploring him "not to faint in your providential mission.
While your enthusiasm is aflame, and the tide of events runs high, let
the work be finished effectually. Leave no root of bitterness to
spring up and work fresh misery to your children." Nor did Lincoln
fail to respond; Americans who could interest Britain in the northern
cause were unofficial ambassadors to the people; and our minister,
Charles Francis Adams labored with all sorts and conditions of men to
make the government of Britain accept the will of the British people.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a final step in the domestic
statesmanship of the war; it was also a step in the diplomacy of the
war, for it insured us the good will of the British people; and that
good will was vital to the success of the Union. The North was coming
close to war with the _government_ of Britain, and the people's open
prejudice in favor of Lincoln and freedom kept England from sufficient
aid to the Confederacy.
The next address of the United States to the people of Europe is a
long tragedy, its consequences so dreadful today that we can barely
analyze the steps by which the great work for human freedom was
destroyed.
_Wilson to the World_
Following the precedent of the Declaration, Woodrow Wilson began in
1916 to address himself to the people of the nations at war in Europe.
To ministries, German and British both, Wilson was sending
expostulations on U-boats and embargos; to the peoples of Europe he
addressed those speeches which were made at home; presently he wrote
inquiries to the ministers which they were compelled to make public
(since publication in neutral countries was certain). Then, after the
Soviets of Russia had gone over the heads of the Foreign Offices, to
appeal to the workers of the world, Wilson carried his own method to
its necessary point and, after we entered the war, began the masterly
series of addresses to the German people which were so effective in
creating the atmosphere of defeat.
They created at the same time the purposes of allied victory. The war
ended and one of the magnificent spectacles of modern times occurred:
the people of Europe were for a moment united, and they were united by
an American declaring the objectives of American life. The moment was
so brief that few knew all it meant until it had passed; in the
excitement of spectacles and events, of plots and processions, this
moment when Europe trembled with a new hope passed unnoticed.
What happened later to Woodrow Wilson is tragic enough; but nothing
can take away from America this great moment in European history--to
which every observer bears testimony, even the most cynical. The
defeated people of Germany saw in America their only defence against
the rapacity of Clemenceau, the irresponsible, volatile opportunism of
Lloyd George, the crafty merchandising of Orlando; the first "liberal"
leader, Prince Max, had deliberately pretended acceptance of the
fourteen points in order to embarrass Wilson; but he spoke the truth
when he said that Wilson's ideals were cherished by the overwhelming
majority of the German _people_; and quite correctly the Germans saw
that nothing but American idealism stood between them and a peace of
vengeance. The enthusiasm of the victorious peoples was less selfish,
but it was equally great; a profound distrust of their leaders had
grown in the minds of realistic Frenchmen and Britons, they sensed the
incapacity of their leaders to raise the objectives of the war above
the level of the "knockout blow" or the _revanche_. As the Germans
cried to be protected in their defeat, the victorious people asked to
be protected from such fruits of victory as Europe had known for a
thousand years. The demagogues still shouted hoarsely for a noose for
the Kaiser and the old order in Germany began to plan for the next
time--but the people of Europe were united; they had gone through the
same war and, for the first time in their history, they wanted the
same peace. It was the first time that an American peace was proposed
to them.
_How Wilson Was Trapped_
Woodrow Wilson made a triumphal tour of the allied capitals and by the
time he returned to Paris for the actual business of the peace, he had
become the spiritual leader of the world. He was not, however, the
political leader of his own country--he had lost the Congressional
elections and he allowed the diplomats of Europe to make use of this
defeat. They began to cut him off from the people of Europe; he fell
into the ancient traps of statesmanship, the secre
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